#filter failure

Discipline is a major part of having a healthy information filter. While your carefully created filter can block out unnecessary consumption, it can’t prevent you from the physical action of consuming.

(Source: Freeimages.com)

So...

Use a dedicated clock as an alarm - not your phone. It can lead you to check email, peruse social media, and inundate you with information right when you wake up.

Disable push notification and prevent items from popping up on your phone lock screen.

Spend only as much time on tasks as they are worth. In other words, don’t get absorbed into the task of checking your newsfeed. Stick to the allotted time you have given yourself in checking your instagram or twitter feed, lest you information overdose yourself.

Schedule time to check email and social media, and definitely be wise on how often you check your social media and email - too little and you miss certain news, too much and you risk an addiction to checking information availability.

If you’d like other tips on dealing with information overload, read more:

Dealing with information overload

Curating your information

How to have a healthy info-diet

Don’t multitask!

The power of filtering information comes from techniques we need to incorporate into our daily routines. These techniques simply make our lives easier and at the end of the day, benefit you.

Curation is an important action to do. It streamlines the information we are looking at, and crunches down the number of websites we need to enter and trawl through to find what we need. A big time waster and information overloader is the action of distraction and curation will also aid in minimizing that.

RSS feeds to compile blogs and websites you are interested in allows you to stay on track without distraction.

You can find the RSS symbol on various blogs and websites. Clicking it provides users an easy way to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Similarly streamlining social media by compiling your accounts into a dashboard does the same thing.

Additionally, the issue of proper curation comes into play when you are searching for things on engines like Google - using proper search syntax to refine results provides you more accurate links to peruse, and has you slogging less through potentially unuseable material.

A screenshot of Google’s most common search syntax. (Source: Google)

If you’d like to read further:

Dealing with information overload

How to have a healthy info-diet

Keep disciplined

Don’t multitask!

Before the internet, publishing had been a distinction, with a limited number of people lucky, talented or wealthy enough to share ideas or images with a wide audience. After the rise of social media, publishing became a default, with non-participation the exception. There’s a problem with this rise in shared self-expression: we’ve all still got a constant and limited amount of attention available. For those creating content, this means the challenge now is not publishing your work, but finding an audience. The problem for those of us in the audience — i.e., all of us — is filtering through the information constantly coming at us.

Filters and Filter Failure: Part 3: 2nd Stage Filtration

Welcome to Part 3 of this series of blog posts which focus on the concept that ‘it’s not information overload: it’s filter failure’ first identified by Clay Shirky back in 2008.

If you’ve been following from Parts 1 and 2, you will be familiar with my prototype for 2-stage filtration, a (tongue in cheek) model for discussing how we might better manage information, to ensure that what we interact…

Filters and Filter Failure: Part 2: 1st stage filtration

If you have read part oneof this series of blog posts on critical web literacy, information overload and filter failure, you will be familiar with my prototype for a ‘two-stage filtration model’ which I suggest may be a (tongue in cheek) way to manage and improve filtration of information, so that we can feel not only more in control of the amount of information we encounter every day, but also…

Filters and Filter Failure: Part 1: It’s not Information Overload…

This is part one of a three part blog series on filters and filter failure. In the first of this series of posts, I reflect on the term ‘filter failure’ and analyse whether the statement ‘it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure’ still holds true. I then suggest a two-stage ‘filtration model’ for critical web literacy, built on both computer and human technology. In part two, I provide…

Notes on Content Overload: Whose Filter Failure?

“Here’s what the Internet did: it introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there’s no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish…The filter for quality is now way downstream of the site of production.

What we’re dealing with now is not the problem of information…