Dealing with Information Overload (Part I)

Dealing with Information Overload by Dan Messer (The Cyberpunk Librarian)

When I was part of a traditional library setting, I was sometimes asked to help managers deal with information overload, particularly when it came to keeping up on information in their subject field or the field which was important to the area of the business they governed.  I knew these people weren’t going to have a lot of time on their hands to truly be the subject matter experts they wanted to be.  (And occasionally, I’ll still get this question.) So my answer was similar to Dan’s in his post:

Don’t try.  And don’t stress about not being able to absorb everything because it’s impossible.

There are just too many sources of information to keep track of.  At certain levels of the organization, it’s more important to have a general idea of major news than trying to process all of it.  Instead, here’s what I’d advise:

• Choose 1 print or online newspaper to scan every day.  Just scanning the headlines can be useful to keeping information on the intellectual radar.
• Choose 1 magazine to scan on a regular basis that relates to the subject matter topic for deeper reading engagement.
• Choose 1 blog to scan daily.  Blogs are a great way to get a perspective slightly off what the mainstream media is saying and they are often quick to read.
• Choose 1 pop culture source to check in with on a semi-regular basis.  Yes, I actually recommended US Weekly and People to executives.  You’d be surprised on how often the material in these sources ends up as cocktail party fodder.  Additionally, items that may seem silly and faddish may also end up influencing business.  (Example: video games.)   
• Rely on your network of friends and colleagues to feed you information of interest.  You can’t watch everything, but your friends will probably send you items they know you are interested in when they see them. 
• Rely on your librarian as a curator.  This is where I’d often pimp my services to set up alerts for clients on topics of importance to them. 

I’d also provide them with a list reliable sources that would help get them started, although many people often already had their favorites.  And I’d show them how to set up a feed reader, but I doubt many of them did.  (In my opinion, most feed readers are not intuitive to set up and most of these folks didn’t have that much interest in learning new technology.) 

I thought this was a pretty good strategy both for helping clients keep up-to-date on pertinent happenings, as well as make it more manageable.  What strategies have you tried to help your clients deal with information overload?

Next time… why this doesn’t work for embedded librarians.