Zen and the Art of Filters

One of the biggest challenges of today’s digital lifestyle is the sheer volume of information with which we’re barraged every moment of every day. It’s not uncommon to receive hundreds of emails each day (both work and personal), be continually disturbed by IM from multiple networks, read news from a smorgasboad of RSS sources and of course both receive and write tweets all day from the thousands of people you follow. And that’s just a small fraction of it.

Consequently, it’s easy to experience increased anxiety as you worry about what you might have missed. The fear of somehow NOT knowing something can become overwhelming. And of course, you just HAVE to check your email, rss feeds, IM and tweets last thing at night before you go to bed. You know, just in case.

What’s needed to overcome this problem is a combination of both habit and technology. The key thing to understand is that not only are you unlikely to be able to keep up with everything, but that you don’t really need to - instead, you simply need to learn how to filter.

Filtering is paring down the information flow to its essentials, taking in and processing only what you need. This is something that we do regularly without even realizing it, such as picking out a face in the crowd or listening to just one conversation at a party. It’s being able to accept that ultimately there’s a lot of junk out there that we really don’t need. Note for example today’s Techrunch post, which bemoans the overload of information on, and about, twitter. It’s simply not possible to listen to 4000 people and hear them all.

Technology can play a role. There are already many applications that seek to consolidate and simplify the information flows in our digital lives. Pownce, Digsby, Friendfeed and Pidgin are all examples of such. However, one area they all lack thus far is including some form of filter mechanism to restrict those updates to things (or people) we really want to know about. Ultimately, the greatest filter is your own mind. It’s up to you to forge the habits needed to reduce the amount of digital junk you ingest - removing RSS feeds you don’t read, reading your email less frequently, following less people on twitter. And reducing the junk coming in makes it much more likely that you won’t have junk coming out.