Information management 1

(I composed this entry as a thinking aid. I wasn't going to post it, but it's not like I have anything else to put here at the moment. Don't read this unless you're interested in rambling details about my information lifestyle! -- clc)

My site-reading habits -- by which I mean the websites I like to read in feed form -- vary widely over time. Sometimes I can keep up to date from one day to the next, at least for a while... at other times, I won't read blogs for a week.

Same thing with email. While I used to leave my email client open all the time when I was at university and there was a possibility of a time-critical communication landing in my inbox, now I check email a couple of times a day at most, and sometimes not for several days.

In both cases, if I leave it for too long -- and I have a nasty habit of doing just that -- the amount of unread stuff builds up to the point where it becomes a big deal to clear out the backlog... at which point even the thought of opening the application can become daunting in itself, and I'm likely to put it off even longer.

Since sometime last year I've been thinking about ways of managing this influx of information. How do I keep up with it and keep it in control? And what can I do to ensure that the most interesting or important bits of data are not misplaced or forgotten?

The most obvious solution to the problem of staying current would be to reduce the amount of information that I try to monitor. Periodically, I do this for my blog subscriptions, unsubscribing from those which no longer do anything for me or from those whose output, however interesting, is just too prolific for me to comfortably assimilate (bye bye, MetaFilter). The same approach can be taken to thinning out the contents of my inbox, unsubscribing from mailing lists by the same criteria. But there is always a set of things I leave alone, because they're just too good to miss. And, this being the internet, the set of good things -- even though they are scattered few and far between -- is too large for a person to possibly digest. I'm thankful that I probably only know (and probably only can know) of a small percentage of all the sites out there that I would really enjoy.

But I don't think it's the amount of information that I have a problem with, at least not yet. Bloglines tells me that I'm currently monitoring 80 feeds; that's above average for Bloglines users, but it's not a crippling influx of information, given that many of those sites update infrequently. I know people who read twice that number of feeds, and it doesn't take them more than a couple of hours a day. Email I can get out of the way in less than a half hour a day, unless I've let a backlog build, in which case it might take a lot longer than that.

No, it's not an issue of workload, but one of discipline. Once I've cleared every backlog, I just need to make sure I 'do' Bloglines and email every day. So this is what I'll try to do from now on. Turning an irregular activity into a daily routine is something I haven't had a great deal of success with in the past, but hopefully this one is simple enough that it might actually happen.

For me, the bigger question -- and one which I don't yet have an answer to -- is management of information after I've 'consumed' it. Invariably, there will be things I want to remember, or refer to later, or keep somehow 'on file'. Articles, items of trivia, quotations, good jokes I've read or heard. It would be very nice to be able to do this mentally, but my memory's not that good. (Besides, some things -- like long URLs -- are unsuited to memorisation.) Usually it's all I can do to remember that I once read something somewhere on a particular subject. On rare occasions I might remember enough about where or when I read it that I can dredge up the information again with an internet search. But I think most of the things that I read will be forgotten about completely within a week.

This bugs the hell out of me! It seems to me that if I read an interesting article on the web (or in a newspaper, or see an interesting documentary on TV... this applies to all forms of information) and then, a short time later, have forgotten everything I gained from it, then it was pretty much a waste of time to read/watch it in the first place. From a certain point of view, information consumed but not retained is wasted.

I'm not interested in being able to recall every single fact I ever read or hear. I just want to be able to remember/reference the things that I thought were particularly interesting, or funny, or worth knowing, or handy in an argument. I call this goal information conservation.

This is my biggest and quirkiest neurosis, and I don't know anyone else who shares it. I accept that this probably makes me weird, and that I'm not explaining it very well at any rate. But it bothers me, and it's a problem I want to solve.

(Lots of ideas about this, will probably write more on the subject sometime. -- clc)