It’s a typical day. You wake up, stretch, roll over to grab your phone, spend a few minutes catching up on Facebook notifications and your Twitter feed. Drag yourself out of bed, slide those wonderful furry slippers on, grab the paper from outside, and pour yourself a bowl of cereal so you can eat and read it. Then your day begins. A few texts from Jenny, logging onto Skype, getting the latest on Facebook, and some time spent browsing CNN.com, all while you listen to the radio or TV is on in the background. Now, when you think about it, that is A LOT of information being thrown at you all day! Absorbing all of this information can take a lot of time out of our day. So what can we do about it?
Streamline Your Information: Instead of using several mediums to get information and communicate, shrink that down with a few services that combine all of this information for you, often for free. Below, I've mentioned my two favorites and how I use them.
Trillian: is a service that can combine your chats from Skype, Gmail, Facebook, and many others into one instant messenger that easily takes care of everything for you. This app has actually made me much more productive and freed up time from my day. I found myself primarily using Facebook for the messaging feature to talk to my friends and in turn, getting distracted by logging on Facebook a lot. Now I only get on Facebook once or twice a day and can still easily connect with friends.
Feedly: is a fantastic news-streaming platform that allows you to enter your favorite sites that you visit daily, and then congregates them into a single feed that features all of the day’s articles. It even allows you to split information into categories, in case you just want to catch up on business news or what happened today in technology.
These are just a couple of suggestions for dealing with information overload. It’s incredible how easy it is to get sucked into constantly and consistently reading every little bit of information that is thrown at you. Or even just the obsession with connecting with friends. It is easy to burn a few hours just delving through other’s profiles on Facebook. Consider instead, boosting your own productivity and still maintaining a little of both worlds and streamline the process. It will take some focusing to buckle down and do, but it’s worth it! There’s many other tactics out there. I’d love to hear how you do it in the comments below!
Post written by Nick Rizzi. Check out his Blog or connect on Google Plus with him.