Chapter 9: How to filter
March 21, 2012
With so many outlets for news the key to keeping up to date is organization. We truly do have information overload. Between, email, newspapers, Twitter, news applications on your mobile phone, radio, television and watching/reading content online, we are always being fed new information.
What I do
I personally use the Twitter for Mac application. In the top right hand corner, there is a little Twitter bird. When that bird is blue, I know that there are new Tweets on my timeline.
Even when I’m working, I check back every few minutes or so and see what’s happening.
But if you use Twitter and follow more than a couple hundred accounts, I would suggest using TweetDeck. With this, you can filter into whatever categories that you prefer: fashion, sports, entertainment, comedians, food and so on and so forth.
Information overload
Even though I think I’m pretty caught up with new technology and I use a lot of it, I can feel very overwhelmed with all the information. With that, there is no excuse to be behind on the times. You can be that person that’s talking about Spotify a few months after it became cool or you can talk about what program your using instead of Spotify because it’s better (damn hipsters!). Pick a couple of tech blogs or websites and keep up. There is the ever popular Engadget and Mashable or the one I read, the Verge. There are no excuses!
So once you’ve figured all that out, organize your own personal feeds. We’ve talked about Twitter and using things like TweetDeck to filter your timeline. But what about your email? And calender? This is why I love Google. I can sync EVERYTHING. My calnder, my email, my documents or… all of this:
There is actually more but I will spare you that screenshot.
The point is that there are a number of tools to keep your organized. The RSS Feed is also a great tool if you feel overwhelmed by the all the blogs and/or websites you visit. Scroll through it, see what you like, what you don’t and choose what to read.
There is a lot to take in but these days but there are solutions to filter it all out and there really is no excuse to not keep up.
