It’s resolution time of year again. Most people are talking about going on regular diets to lose weight (which I am too) but I’m also going to continue my information diet. What is that? I am limiting the amount of information I get – emails, newsletters, magazines, etc – to the information I think I really need and I’m learning how best to read and absorb that information.
The first thing I did was to unsubscribe to as many e-newsletters as I could. That has drastically cut down on my email and I hope to be able to work off an empty inbox. Out of the newsletters I was getting that I still wanted to read, I went to their site to see if I could add a feed to my reader. What does that mean? Let me explain a bit more.
I use Google Reader. It pulls feeds from different sites and blogs into one platform that I can read as often as I like. All I have to do is subscribe to a site on my reader and it automatically pulls in the new articles once they are published. This way those emails are no longer clogging up my inbox, but I still get the information I wanted. I have more control over when and where I read it. I’ve now taken it a step further and searched out sites that I didn’t have e-newsletters from but I wanted to keep up to date with from time to time. For example, I have several feeds from the New York Times, Journal of Accountancy, Atlanta Business Chronicle, etc.
I mentioned earlier that I try to keep my inbox empty. This just helps me feel more organized and not as overwhelmed. Some new things I am employing is using the task feature in Outlook. If I get an email that I need to do something about, I drag it to “Tasks” and create a new task with a due date for myself. I can keep track of all my tasks by showing the task pane within Outlook. Once I have created that task, I then move the email to an appropriate subfolder. See, I lost a little bit more e-weight!
When going on an information diet, you are spending your energy on better effectively managing your information. Sure, you want to delete the junk, but you still need information to be a better professional. I want you to take a look at all the information you are being bombarded with everyday. What should you cut out? Where can you move some of that information so that it doesn’t get lost or distract you from your duties? If you start going on an information diet, you might just find that you are less distracted during the day and more productive.
If you want to start your own reader, I have put a list together of all the items I currently have on my own reader. You can check it out here.
