How do you manage the Flood of Posts - Information Overload?

- The Flood of Information in our Exabyte World -

In today's digital world we create over an exabyte of data per day in total. According to recent estimates the entire human history of information and media combined from beginning of time through 2003 would take up about 5 exabytes of storage space. We now create about five exabytes in just two days of blogging, tweeting, and posting Facebook updates.
We share pictures and videos, and write books worth of updates on these social networks.
It's pretty amazing how fast it's grown thanks to our latest digital technology. And it can also become an overwhelming flood of information that becomes hard to sift through.

What's The Cure? (Hint: It's not the cloud)

We are not going to slow down the amount information. If anything it will only keep increasing. What we can do is work on filtering our incoming messages. Making sure we get the ones sent directly to us. And the latest updates from those we care about the most. Also while we filter through the news and blogs, videos and other media we can begin curating the important stuff, which might be very useful to others as well.
Check out this video where Steven Rosenbaum explains Curation and why he believes its the savior of the Exabyte Flood

Here we will go through a couple of ways to filter and organize our inboxes and timelines.

Organize Your Email Inbox.

Many email clients have a way of filtering incoming mail for you based on your specifications. The emails will then go in separate labels instead of cluttering up your inbox in one big pile.
Follow this video tutorial for Gmail to see how the process works.

I know you can do almost the same in Hotmail and some other email clients. If you're like me you've been tempted to unsubscribe to some of  the promotion, news, and spam sources in order to get control of your inbox. Instead of unsubscribing you can give them a break but filter them out for now instead.
Sometimes I might actually be in the mood to read promotion email. And I'm glad they're all in one spot, away from my inbox and business inbox.

Get your Topics Bundled

When you filter your email inbox you're already learning about bundling your own topics.
For example, if you get emails from your favorite news websites you can have them all show up in a label called "News"; while notifications from Facebook or other social networks can go to "Communities". I like to read all my social media messages, Facebook, twitter, everything in one place, in my email like this.
But Occasionally I'll use one of the tools below.

Google Reader

My favorite RSS reader. RSS lets you subscribe to your favorite sites on the web and read them all in one place. There you can categorize them into labels/folder, and get the latest articles/media as soon as it's posted. You won't be able to read all your friends facebook updates or tweets. But we can use another tool for that.
· Video: Google Reader in Plain English   · Video: Organizing Feeds into Folders with Google Reader

Categorize your Friend Lists

Once your friend list starts to include acquaintances as well you'll probably want to do some filtering of sorts to make sure you can see all your (favorite) friends updates. Otherwise they'll get lost in the flood of information.

Facebook Friend Listing

There's an option called "Close Friends" if you hover over the "Friends" button on someones page. You need to be their friend first.
By adding to close friends their updates get special priority. By adding to any other list you can filter through the various "streams" from your homepage. Alternatively you can add new friends directly into lists
· Video: Creating Separate Friend Lists on Facebook · Video: Using lists to Limit Who can See your Posts

Twitter Lists

Use Twitters lists to categorize the people you follow. This way you can follow all the people in your niche, your friends, business associates, and any celebrity you want and make sense of it all.
Video: Add a List on Twitter

HootSuite - Manage your Social Networks

A place to check all your social network streams and messages all in one place. You can also post to them all from one place.
The email filtering only gathers your direct messages or mentions, with hootsuite you can get your friends updates as well.
A similar application is Bottlenose. Try them and see which one you like better.

Hopefully these tips will make it easier for you to manage the flood if posts. Have any other tips that have helped you? Feel free to leave a comment.

Pin It