If innovations like Dopplr keep occurring  then we may soon obviate the need for calendars entirely.

There seems to be a spurt of new products/services launched recently to help us save/manage time with our recent information glut. The theory goes something like this.

1. Use our tool to filter the information coming into your reader (or whatever)
2. Our tool filters the the incoming stuff allowing you to only consume the stuff your really wanted.

I have a big problem with this, not just the system trying to second guess (even with the wisdom of crowds) my tastes or wants. Rather this whole thing is a strawman anyhow. Let me explain by means of an example.

My largest incoming data stream is feeds via google reader, I may be atypical here but I ruthlessly prune my feeds on a regular basis. This pruning occurs when I start getting to much stuff I am not interested in, but this doesn’t happen weekly infact probably not even monthly, so it’s not really a big chore or even a big overhead. But back to the point, I spend very little time dealing with non-relevant or uninteresting information, I step through a river of news (J,J,J,J,J…) when its interesting I read it, when it is not I press the magic ‘j’ key, I repeat this until my river of news is consumed - simple. So if I analyse my time spent (attention etc..) I spend less than 1% of it on uninteresting or non-relevant information. That means I spend more than 99% of my time consuming relevant interesting information. Thus these tools would offer me very little improvements in efficiency or time saving.

This post would not be complete however if I did not suggest an alternative to these tools to help deal with the information glut. Here are some tips that might help :

1. Learn to speed read
2. Subscribe to feeds rather than accessing the web site
3. Use strong ad-blockers because most advertising really is wasting your attention
4. Get someone else to aggregate and summarise for you and deal with not knowing it all i.e. delegation
5. Just fscking deal with the fact we are in a golden age of information availability and change your life around that fact to take advantage of it. You could start by charging by value rather than hour.

Am I atypical? only you can help me here, what are your tips?

Today my youngest daughter (6 years old) amazed me. She has a set of character dominoes based on 'Dora The Explorer', after tipping them out to play she said "I can't play with these daddy there are 2 missing". I was curious how she new they were missing and whats more how she knew instantly which ones were missing. She knew this within a few seconds and wasn't counting etc.. I wondered if she had photographic memory, so I asked how she worked out what was missing. She replied that two of the characters didn't have their doubles. In dominoes of course all members have doubles whether made from numbers or characters. I thought what a brilliant top down diagnosis (potentially algorithm) and great way of starting your check for missing pieces. She put them away and got the numerical (grown up) dominoes and proceeded along the same checking procedure before playing with them, astounding, she'd make a good programmer or detective or even doctor I guess.

Markets move slower than the innovators and disruptors, because crowds move more slowly than individuals. But some memes having staying power because they act on the crowd virally, they resonate and move through the herd, long enough to gather exponential bifurcation.