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Following the rule “instead of email it to some friends or put some poor twits let’s write a blog post.”

How much time do I spend using twitter?
How much time do I spend reading blog posts?
How much time do I spend searching for information in the web?
How much time do I spend producing something after I assimilate all these information?

Actually the time I spent in Google finding information got drastically reduced due the huge amount of feeds and the use of twitter. I spend my time reading the updates in the blogs I follow and following the links of people I follow on twitter. I end up just jumping from one link to another reading everything I can. At the end of the day I’m tired; all my brain energies had been spent assimilating information but producing none. So I had to look for a good equilibrium between input and output.

What am I looking for? Information. Yes but what kind of information? Something related to my niche, something that I’m just interested in or something in a new field or just some news to see what’s going on in the world.

The point is that I have to read all these stuff but I also need time to assimilate it and time to be productive. Of course that information will be really useful, not only to keep me updated, but to bring me the opportunity to generate content of better quality.

So I divided it by time and no-time dependent content.
News for example are time dependent content. The end of Second World War II was the hot news in September 1945 but not today. So first let’s think about the sources and organize each of them.
I count with three mayor information sources: Feeds, Twitter and Google.

Feeds:

Separate them by topics and each of them by time and no-time dependent ones. For example in photography I want to know ASAP when a new camera model comes out, it’s price and availability. This information is time dependent. I don’t want to twit about the new Nikon D5000!! many months after it’s launched.
For me actually the time dependent approach is one of the most important ones and I try to read it in the morning and stop reading it until the next day. Usually news information is easy to assimilate in few minutes; just a superficial reading is enough to identify what is really important and what is not. But don’t keep the whole day reading news, it’s worthless.

Keep checking during the day some of the top blogs you consider the most valuable sources of information, specially the ones that not only are important for you but that generate more than one post per day. Be careful and don’t select many of them, at the end you’ll spend all your time just reading.

Twitter:

Actually lists help a lot. I created a list based on topics and one “personal” one where I added the people that I know personally and that are living in the same zone. I don’t want to loose a new tweetup or the info of an event near my zone.

Personally I’m not a channel follower. Too much information, I got overloaded and again because of that, I have no time to do other stuff.
Try to take a rest from twitter, time to time. I stopped to update the status every second to see what happened. It could become compulsive and obsessive. Just let the time pass, one hour is a reasonable time. If you are involved in a conversation of course, you have to keep checking it, but if not, just checking the time line every hour should be a good approach.

Google:

Except the specific search in a specific moment, I do periodic searches about what I cannot find in feeds, twitter and topics related to my niche of interest. In that way I found many useful blogs. I do this around three times per week.

The key is organization and self control to avoid spending too much time doing only one thing. The no-time related content can stay in the cabinet for long time. The most important thing is that you don’t loose it, so keep it apart and little by little you’ll be able to read it all. Anyway I didn’t find any platform or tool that could help me arrange and manage properly the information in the web. I would like a tool that could login to the platforms I joined and do some search on them, bookmark links, program some alerts based on some keywords, time or events, and so forth. Actually I’m using many tools to accomplish only one task: organization.

What do you use to organize yourself with the never ending stream of information?
Do you read everything you find in the web? Don’t you feel loosing productivity and sometimes feeling that after you read so much it’s like you didn’t read anything?