One of the first things I did as 2009 rolled into view was to delete all my RSS feeds and start all over again. Okay, to be honest, I did back them up as OPML first before I did the act. Which was soon followed by a massive Twitter follow purge that saw my follow count drop by almost half.

I have never been someone who has had problems consuming a lot of information. In fact, if anything, I have always thrived being snowed under a mountain of information, stowing them away in the recesses of the mind till I can put two-and-two together to form a larger picture at a later time.

But, of late, I have had trouble keeping up. I have multiple "to-read" lists littered in my browser and various text files, a pile of text documents, presentations and PDFs that I have not had the time to read. No matter how much I optimized my workflow, those lists never seemed to get smaller.

And then there was this telling statistic:

According to Google Reader, from a 30-day sample, I had 176 subscriptions, from which I had read 7,827 items. Assuming that I was consuming 50 words per items it meant that I was reading almost 13045 words ((7827/30)*50) in a day. Add Twitter to the mix where a 24 hour sample for me was stretching into 40 pages, which, at 20 tweets per page results in about 800 tweets being sent my way. Assuming that an average tweet word count is 10 per tweet, that adds another 8000 words that I am following per day.

Those two numbers alone meant that I was doing roughly 21,000 words in a day. And I have not accounted for emails, other correspondence and any other form of reading in that number, even without which it is scary. Yes, it is true that you don't actually 'read' those 21k words, but all those cost me attention of varying magnitudes and even after chopping it down to 15k to account for things I may have overlooked, it still is a big number.

Thus, the feed reader purge and Twitter purge came into being. I had gone way out of my depth in being able to consume or process all of this information and it was time I got around to addressing it. The feeling of constantly chasing a vanishing tail is not nice and between the feeds, Twitter, email, IM and another 50 distractions, it had become exactly that.

Think about it. There are just way too many of us who have the feeling of not having enough time, of the constant anticipation of something being ignored/forgotten/missing manifesting out of nowhere at the next alt+tab cycle. There is this constant need for something to happen and the need be in the know that is plaguing us. When was the last time you were okay with having nothing to do or feel? I really cannot remember such a time.

A huge part of the problem is the broken information discovery model I have spoken about earlier. Most of the current systems don't learn much about me as an individual, they do discovery by generalizing me into a group people with shared similarities. This is roughly the mediocristan that Taleb can't seem to stop talking about. It works fine if you are prone to being at one with a large-sh mass, but it just won't work for you if you are prone to large deviations or unpredictable patterns as an individual.

Honestly, I don't think there is going to be a solution to this any time soon. So I have to find ways to make this work for myself using other means, which has meant a couple of things:

1. Chat/IM is largely out. Use email to contact me
2. I will keep my Twitter follow list to about 60-70 and reduce it even further if the need arises
3. Dropped my Google Reader subscriptions to seven feeds from 170, with only aggregated feeds in it now
4. Changed my auto-refresh settings in Twhril for all tweets to 10 minutes.

The idea behind all of this is to put speed breakers for the volume and quality of information that reaches me. The quantity reduction will allow me to pick and choose better what I want to deal with, than to interact with every bit of information that comes my way. Ideally, I want to be doing lesser quantity and more of quality, which is not quite the way the world is tuned into doing things. So this will take some time and effort to pull of. It should be an interesting journey.

The eventual aim is to pull off this little idea, do a bit of good work and live the rest of my life doing preferably a majority of only those things that I want to do.

information overload