Information Overload

A recent piece in the McKinsey Quarterly makes a simple, if maternal, point: technology results in information overload and attention fragmentation, and the more responsibility one has (and the more data one is supposed to absorb), the more pronounced the impact.  The perils are fairly obvious: consistent multi-tasking slows down the completion of tasks, harms our creativity, and is highly addictive (um, crackberry!).  McKinsey gives us a simple shorthand in response: Focus, Filter and Forget (and imagine the additional benefit if one simply reverses the order).

And trust an actual technologist to give us similar and practical advice.  Paul Kedrosky provides this shorthand of tactics. It’s a good list (and a keen reminder of why we write newsletters and not just brief tweets).