Tools for Thought

Information overload is the stress of infinite opportunity. In a world of bottomless information resources, the need to ruthlessly gatekeep our information intake is absolute.

Working online is a walk through a minefield of time sinks disguised as quick lookups. One of the best reality checks against getting drawn into interesting articles is applying the Two Minute Rule: “Will this take longer than two minutes to read?” If the answer is yes, read it now if it’s appropriate (as adults, we know when and what to read at work).

If the answer is no, print the article and put it in a folder labelled Read/Review. Use any odd windows of time during the day to read these items. If a meeting starts late, if you’re on a train, if you’re stuck in a long line, chip away at your Read/Review folder.

Use the Read/Review folder for any paper-based discretionary reading — not just printouts of online articles, but memos, magazine clippings, or any other materials that fit. The Read/Review folder is for discretionary reading, not for active projects. Project support material should be put in appropriately labelled project folders, which will be addressed later. Content in Read/Review is unsorted and unprioritized.

There are other, possibly more ecological, ways of collecting Read/Review material. You can bookmark articles, email them to yourself, or archive them if they arrived as RSS feeds. But a physical folder has a few advantages:

• It can be read through anywhere, particularly offline
• Paper immediately gives you a sense of how much volume you’ve committed yourself to reading, encouraging you to eliminate the nonessential
• It corrals papers that didn’t originate online, preventing them from spreading out over every surface in the home and office
• Separate placeholders for discretionary reading and project support material prevents perceiving all paperwork as a single mass that can’t be easily prioritized
• Keeping articles off of your Next Actions keeps your lists manageably short

Read/Review can work in combination with a tickler file if you’d like to manage the total amount of reading that goes into your folder each day. Instead of filing an articles directly in Read/Review, you can distribute articles across future dates in the tickler file — one article each day, for example.