From To-Done! | Productivity Tips For Avid Blog Readers:

Information overload is one of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to deal with on the road to being more productive. There is so much out there and it’s so damn easy to spend hours sorting through your favorite blogs and Web sites… I went through a phase where I really felt overwhelmed by the amount of news coming in and amazingly huge number of unread items I’d have. I decided shortly thereafter to put into place some kind of rules, and a process, to keep control of all the information. I needed to do this so that I could stay sane and keep focused on my work.

This is a dilemma that I’ve run into with blogs. Even though feed readers like Bloglines and the like make it really easy to track a bunch of different sources, it’s essentially allowing a lot more input into your life and another potential avenue for procrastination. It’s very much like mailing lists, which are another example of something that can be seductive productivity-killers.

My strategies to minimize this are:

• Ruthlessly prune out stuff that isn’t giving you a lot of value or entertainment. I recently deleted a whole bunch of feeds, including Slashdot, which is just about useless to me.
• Read the mobile version of Bloglines on my Treo when I’m waiting around not doing anything. This way it’s not really using up productive time anyway.

Here’s an interesting article that claims that the simple act of chewing gum increases the mind’s ability to concentrate and to retain knowledge.

Research has shown that chewing does indeed increase our ability to concentrate and to retain what we’ve learned. In fact, studies indicate that, for both kids and adults, mental tasks are completed up to 20% more effectively when we chew gum.

Link

• Ricky’s RAM Dump | Think Better with Chewing Gum

I just read a fascinating article on how addiction to technology and interruptions sap productivity. A few interesting quotes:

• “The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.”
• “The paradox of modern life is that multitasking is, in most cases, counterproductive.”

Link

• Driven to distraction by technology

A brilliant and insightful comic strip that sums up the typical problems people have when they attempt to get organized.