Digital Diva • Information Overload!

Information Overload!

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about the never-ending deluge of information in our modern day lives and the effect it is having on our sanity.

It’s easy to get stressed, especially when working in the digital industry, by:

keeping up with latest digital developments
updating your twitter feed
checking and responding to email
writing perfect (ha!) prose for your blog
reading all the other blogs and newsletters you subscribe to

…oh yes, and completing your work on time.

Today’s world is frenetic, it’s fast-paced, it’s now now now!

It’s easy to feel like you are the only one suffering. But even people like Charlie Brooker, who seems very calm and in control, are feeling their concentration fail in the battle to stand up to the ‘live’ nature of our digital world.

In Charlie Brooker’s excellent blog post about Google Instant, he wrote:

By 1pm I’d written precisely three lines of script. Yet my fingers had scarcely left the keyboard. My brain felt like a loose, whirring wheel that span with an audible buzz yet never quite touched the ground.

and:

My attention span was never great, but modern technology has halved it, and halved it again, and again and again, down to an atomic level, and now there’s nothing discernible left. Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100% physically present. I wasn’t using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm.

So, how do we help ourselves? Here are two options for you to think about.

1) Read Wisdom 2.0

I read a very good book called Wisdom 2.0 by Soren Gordhamer recently. I really recommend everyone taking a look at it.

It gives practical advice for striking the right balance with your life and technology and relates it to Buddhist-style thinking. Don’t worry if you aren’t particular into Buddhism, this really is a book that anyone can pick up, understand and learn from. Soren Gordhamer is a writer for Mashable and his own experiences add to the book. None of it is rocket science, I think just reading it makes you think about your own habits and how to deal with them in your own way.

Chris Sacca, former Google Head of Special Initiatives said “This is the instruction manual that should come with our iPhones and Blackberries.”

The trick is trying to remember the advice and not falling back into bad habits!

2) Try the Pomodoro Technique

Later in Charlie Brooker’s blog post he said:

In desperation that evening, I used Google Instant to hunt for solutions, and stumbled across something called the Pomodoro Technique. Put simply, it’s a method for retraining your attention span. You set a kitchen timer, and try to work without interruption for 25 minutes. Then you take a five-minute break. Then you work for another 25 minutes. And so on. It sounded easy, so I disconnected my net connection and gave it a try. By the time I went to bed I’d gone through three “Pomodoro cycles” and written 1,856 words of script