Information Overload is the curse of all Neophiliacs
I’m swamped and I feel guilty about it. I spend what seems like 20 hours a day on the net trying to keep up and the fact is, I just can’t seem to do it. At last count, I regularly ”consume” 212 RSS feeds, a bunch of podcasts, probably 2 dozen daily and monthly email newsletters, four or five monthly magazines that I read cover to cover, physical snail mail from both the house and the office, plus the regular phone calls and email we all get - both important and spam/telemarketers. There are all kinds of tricks that I use like, GTD, email filters and feed aggregators like Bloglines, but I have a very real sense of being flooded. I’m struggle daily trying to seperate the signal from the noise, but my real problem is that I have a fear of missing something. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a condition of my own making, but I’m addicted to “new”. I’m a self-diagnosed “neophiliac” - literally “in love with new things” and some other terms that have been used to describe people with this affliction are “Trendspotter” and “Cool Hunter”. I don’t think I’m cool enough to call myself those things so I’m going to stick with the slightly more clinical, vauguely naughty term. I have a feeling that many tech obsessed geeks feel the same way. Unfortunately for me, no amount of data filters or editors are going to be able to tell me what I should see without me feeling like I haven’t done more that scratched the surface of a topic. With so many good content producers coming online everyday, I think that this problem will only get worse until I decide that I just don’t care as much anymore.
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