How valuable is your time?
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.
- Use our tool to filter the information coming into your reader (or whatever)
- 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 :
- Learn to speed read
- Subscribe to feeds rather than accessing the web site
- Use strong ad-blockers because most advertising really is wasting your attention
- Get someone else to aggregate and summarise for you and deal with not knowing it all i.e. delegation
- 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?