Over on 0xDECAFBAD, Les writes about The zen of firehose drinking. Totally true. Fight InformationOverload – in his words: “Aggregate, prioritize, peruse, and discard with abandon. This is continuous partial attention at work.”
Strange how I have always felt better when I switched email client or address and had the option of just starting over with a clean inbox. No huge queue of stuff to be read. I also felt much better after unsubscribing from many EmacsMailingLists. Instead, I subscribed to the EmacsNewsgroups and never read them. Works perfectly fine!
It is also a reason I like IRC. Nobody expects me to know anything about it if I was not there. The medium sends messages that are as ephemeral as befits their quality and quantity. Quite the opposite with mailing lists, newsgroups, and RSS feeds in a typical client: These things accumulate. Each wants to be read. Each demands 100% of our attention, but their quality and quantity do not warrant this treatment.
If the software supports the notion that things are ephemeral, that eases the information overload burden. If you use Bloglines to read you feeds, for example, you’ll note that feeds do not accumulate more than 200 posts. Furthermore, once you click on the feed, all the articles in your queue are marked as read. Some might think it’s a bug. I happen to think it is a feature: If you don’t read them all, don’t worry. They quality and quantity usually don’t warrant perfect attention to every article! (I guess if the article was truly important, one of your friends will link to it, so you’ll get a second chance, haha.)
I noticed that I have started moving emails by friends and family to Gmail, using all my other accounts for official stuff, free software projects, etc. Somehow this is a first step on the way to two classes of email. The ones that demand thorough attention, no matter where I am on the globe, and the ones that I will read when I feel like catching up on things. 😄
#Software