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April 18, 2005

Managing Info Overload

I'm grappling with a familiar dilemma. I've had a lot of fun blogging over the last few weeks, but the result has been a backlog of emails and articles I've meant to read. This week, I finally started catching up, but at the cost of the blogging.

It boils down to this: when I sit down at the computer with some free time, I have have the choice of reading or writing. Ideally, I'd flow smoothly from one to the other. But in practice, they're pretty different mindsets. I find spending a long time at the computer reading puts me in a fuzzy, passive, vaguely tense state. Writing these entries, on the other hand, tends to leave me feeling satisfied, with a sense of accomplishment.

Part of the problem is that reading online is never-ending - there's always backlog. (I start a new tab in Opera for every article I mean to read. I usually have several dozen tabs open at any one time. And I don't want to admit how many messages are sitting in my Inbox right now.) By contrast, posting a blog entry is a much more contained project - when it's done, it's done. (I force myself not to tweak entries, beyond a quick proofread.)

But when I don't keep up with my email, with the New York Times, with Salon and Slate and all my RSS feeds, I feel out of touch, and burdened by the backlog. I worry that blogging is just spinning my wheels, when I could be learning new things and catching up on my responsibilities.

Actually, I worry that the net is screwing up my reading patterns in general. On the one hand, having all this great stuff to read all the time is amazing, of course. But I find that if I don't watch out, I'm only reading ephemeral commentary - news articles, blogs - and never reading books (other than the ones I assign for classes). That's one nice part of adding book reviews to the blog, actually - it gives me another motivation to read entire books.

I can't be the only one feeling this way. I see references to blog overload all the time. A recent ad for The Washington Post on Talking Points Memo, for example, promoted a subscription as a one-stop alternative to having to keep up with dozens of political blogs. (They've pulled back on that now, presumably out of fear of offending the blog-reading audience - now they call themselves "the great complement to political blogs.")

So what's the ideal balance? How best to handle info overload? I don't know, but I do know that active is almost always better than passive, long-term trumps ephemera, and it's silly to stress out over self-imposed info-consumption expectations. So I'm going to do my best to read more books, keep writing, and accept that my online newsgathering may take a hit. And if I owe any of you reading this an email, my apologies - I promise I'll get to it as soon as I can.

Posted by tedf at April 18, 2005 01:29 AM

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