Overwhelmed by the information age? Then you need discipline
The late Allen Carr was an inspiration to many. Certainly this former smoker owes him a lot. A part of his method for prising even the most hardened smoker away from her filthy habit entails her never once returning to it. Even one cigarette is enough to break Carr's spell - and pity the smoker who believes that she might be allowed a nostalgic puff, for that way lies the path back to two packs a day.
I was reminded of Carr's dictum while chatting to a friend the other day about RSS feeds. RSS, or "really simple syndication", is a standard tool that can feed content published on the web from one place to another. It is used by RSS readers, which can be instructed to pull content from all your favourite places online, letting you read it on one page. Think of it as being the editor of your own newspaper - you can grab headlines from sites you trust, on subjects that you care about, and mix them with weather forecasts, or posts from your favourite bloggers. Now stop thinking that, else we will all find ourselves out of a job.
This friend of mine is a passionate and skilled information-gatherer. No matter what is going on in the world, on any given day, and across an eye-wateringly broad selection of topics, this guy knows about it. Like me, he uses RSS to get the information he needs delivered directly to him - but, unlike me, he uses it properly.
The temptation with RSS is to subscribe to ever more feeds, until it becomes impossible to read them all. I succumbed to that temptation long ago. Seduced by the possibility that RSS could be my path to information Zen, I bit off more of the internet than I could chew. The result was that my personalised RSS reader turned into a wasteland of unread feeds, and the task of visiting it became a guilt-laden one.
My friend has a simple solution for this - let not one RSS feed go unread. No matter if it is the last thing on earth you want to do, give it ten seconds of your time and then mark it as read. As with smoking, succumbing to the temptation to ignore just one RSS feed is the pathway to the information abyss. If this means erasing the ones you don't read - do it. Spurred on by his advice, I started afresh, ditching my old reader for a shiny new one, populating it with only the feeds I knew I needed in order to stay informed, and vowing to read every last one.
But the software had got there first. My new RSS reader marks feeds as read as soon as I have scrolled past them, no matter whether I have read them properly or not.
The effect is similar to possessing a well-handled newspaper at the end of the day - you know you only read the gossip page and did the crossword, but the world is none the wiser. All in all, I'm happy with the new arrangement. Because, if I miss anything, I can always rely on my friend to pick it up.
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