Greg at EOD joins the rant about the glut of information and it’s definitely one of the more entertaining ones.
The conclusion:
“As of now, my fancy-pants, community-generated, emergent-behaviour data-sorting heuristic is: a calendar. If I haven’t gotten to something in a week, it dies. Stick that in your attention economy and smoke it. I’m re-booting. Feed list: empty. In-box: empty. TiVo: OK, OK, I still need to watch “24.” But other than that: empty.”
There is a lot to be said for the time based approach.
My dad always used to follow a three draw approach. When his in-tray became full he would put everything out of it into the top draw in his desk. If someone asked him about something he would go and find it, if it was in his top draw it would get put back into his in-tray. Every time his top draw became full he would take everything out of it and place it in the bin without even looking at it. If it had become that old he clearly wasn’t going to get to it and it probably wasn’t relevant anyway. GTD encourages people to do something similar and Greg’s approach sounds equally sensible.
It’s definitely time for people to realise that they need to take control no-one else is going to do it for them.
Graham Chastney 