Information Overload

We’ve been gone on vacation for just over a week, and I’m flooded with electronic “stuff”.  I did manage to check my personal email a few times here and there, but if it was let go after a few days I’d have 50-60 unread messages in my inbox.  Most of those are daily alerts or newsletters, but I try to at least skim through those each day for anything good.  Maybe I should be using some more filters.

My work email, which I didn’t check!, 1730 unread messages when I got in this morning.  Granted, all but ~150 of those were from an automated process that errored out and spit the message back to me, so those were easily cleaned up.  But still, I had 150 messages to go through when I got in, trying to piece together what’s going on, where things are with projects and whatnot.  It’s a pain.

Then there’s the RSS feeds.  I can’t seem to find a specifc number on Google Reader (it only says 1000+), but my breakdown has 1000+ for the regular news sites, 1000+ in tech-related sites, and ~600 for misc blogs and websites.  These are all feeds that I usually read or at least skim in the reader each item.  All in all I’m left with literally thousands of stories that are unread, and no idea what has been going on in the world over roughly the past week and a half.  Am I really that much of a slave to the Internet?

I need something that summarizes the summaries for me!  I’m thinking now I’m just going to “mark all as read”, and figure that if it’s important I’ll find out about it eventually!

On a somewhat related note, I’ve been reading the first book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time now for over a year.  I’ve have multiple coworkers recommend it, and friends rave about it, so I took the opportunity to waste a gift card on set of the first three books.  Lately, I’ve found myself on quite a few cross-country airplane trips, and spend much of the airtime reading.  But I just can’t get into it.  I have no idea why - I enjoy fantasy fiction, and have read many of that genre.  I’ve flown through the last few fiction books I’ve read.   But the Eye of the World just isn’t drawing me in.  Blasphemy, I know, but what the heck?  I’m going to finish it one way or another (maybe in the next year?), but I’m doubting I’ll check out the rest.  [shrug]