It’s been a very busy September for us on W6th, as you could’ve guessed from the minimal posts.

With a client trip to DC and shifts in internal responsibilities my plate has been pretty full and as a result the information I “try” and consume has been building quietly until this weekend I found I had a total of 5,102 unread blog posts in my Bloglines!  Add that to the 70-100 unread email newsletters in my Outlook and 40+ unwatched videos sitting in Miro – enough is enough.

By declaring today my personal “Year Zero”, I managed to free myself from the shackles and either delete or mark everything read/watched.

I’ve seen this mentioned in blog posts before, sometimes as a lead-in to the latest time saving application or method of organizing yourself. That’s not the case here.  I just got overwhelmed with stuff.

I think now that information (of every kind) can be pretty much delivered in the free western world at any point in time, any method of organization will break down at some point and the realization that you just have to declare informational bankruptcy is a fact of life in the 21^st Century.

Email is the obvious culprit, but as we advance in methods of delivering content and storage becomes larger (and cheaper) we will end up with gigs of data we’ll never be able to consume.

Do yourself a favor – Create your own Year Zero and feel the digital weight lift, at least for a couple of minutes

Technorati tags: “information overload”, blogs, e-mail

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