Dealing with Information Overload, Part II
If you haven’t already, check out part I of this series on dealing with information overload.
In a previous post, I wrote about what to do when you have too many tabs open.
It is very easy nowadays to feel overwhelmed at the amount of information that is available to all of us. We now have even more things to distract us from the tasks that we are supposed to be dong.
Although using OneTab is a good solution to implement whenever you find yourself overwhelmed with open tabs, it is really only a temporary fix to help you focus your the current tasks at that moment. How do you actually get around to reading all those links?
Ideally, you shouldn’t.
Many of the articles that we come across aren’t really all that important. They may seem important at the time, but that might be because we are looking for any excuse to avoid our important tasks. Procrastination kicks in, and everything else suddenly seems more urgent and important.
Of course, not many people, including myself. are going to be willing to close all of their unimportant tabs. The solution is to find an efficient way to save these tabs for later, so that you can more easily close these tabs.
I personally use Pocket and Evernote for saving articles to read for later. Evernote acts like a second brain for me, where I can store all kinds of information for later reference. Pocket on the other hand is what I use to read the articles that I save for later.
You could just stick with using OneTab, but I view that as a temporary fix, or as a way to manage a large number of open tabs. Evernote and Pocket allow me to actually revisit these links later if I wish to on my phone, tablet, or eReader. An advantage of this is that I can do this while waiting for the bus, or in line for something.
So whenever I find myself overwhelmed with tabs full of unrelated articles to read later, I’ll save them to my Pocket, and close that tab. I use the Evernote web clipper to throw everything else into Evernote.
Many times, when I do need to find a certain article that I came across a few weeks ago, I can easily find it using Evernote’s search function.
The point is that by saving these links somewhere, I have peace of mind that the link will be there, so I can focus on what I need to be focusing on at the moment.
I find that the majority of the time, I rarely get around to reading these articles, or visiting these links again.
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Written on July 7th, 2016 by Paul Le