Are you Knowledge overloaded?

There is a time in our lives when Knowledge is important... We call it Lifetime;) people have traveled miles and miles to achieve a state in knowledge...We, today are lucky... Knowledge comes to us through a wireless data card or a digital cable of 1 MBPS. Everyone of us is obsessed by knowledge and we want to achieve everything that has anything to do with Knowledge. Yes we are knowledge thirsty , Knowledge greedy ... we deserve it after all. But, Do we utilize the stream of knowledge that comes to us effectively?

No No No No Never

While you are reading the post, can I just ask you to go through and find :

1. The number of RSS feeds of top Bloggers you have subscribed to?

2. How many of them did you refer to in last 1 month?

3. How many twitterers do you follow? Who are they?

4. Newsletters???? Are you crazy about em, Do you read them?

5. Oh! I see you on every tech forum.. when was the last time you helped your mate?

Ashton Kutcher has millions and millions of followers on twitter, we try to achieve the same.. we want thousands of followers... do we care how many of them actually follow? Well dont go far... see how many people you follow on twitter and see how many of them you interact with??? Well we are Knowledge thirsty.. but honestly we are overloaded with Knowledge and once we overload ourselves with Knowledge streams we always overload ourselves with Knowledge streams...

Today I want to share with you on how to NOT get knowledge overloaded....

1. Stop, Think, Look then subscribe!!!

Do you get invite on thousands of social networks from the same friend of yours who sits right beside you, but never communicates with you? Well not to mention he is your friend on Tagged, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, twitter , resumark? God!!! Can you count????

A few days ago, I followed a trend with my friends and followers... I kept posting links and followed how many times the links get accessed. Results... not even 30%. Means that the followers that I have don’t really care about the information I transmit? Or do they really read it or are they loaded with several other followers? If twitter opens up their API’s to let a user know how many of his tweets are actually read ;) the twitterer like Ashton Kutcher would surely quit ;)

Now its your turn... the moment you see a friend on some social network what do you do? Subscribe? Ofcourse curiosity is cool.. but is it useful? Max joined a forum “HTML for Dummies”, he was followed by 20 of his friends some of whom were Web designers. He joined the forum because his son wanted to write his first webpage in his school and he saw some good basic tututorials on it...Then the same set of friends followed everyone he followed on twitter? Do we do that? Yes we do!!! So stop doing it. Stop before you hit the button JOIN.. think if it is relevant to you in any sense.. maybe then subscribe... By following people Ashton Kutcher follows is not going to make James Bond.....

2. RSS Feeds are great, Organize them?

Your Boss reads a lot of feeds, You want to do the same. Any website you go to... you ask Google reader to subscribe to the feed URL. Then end of the month you see 15K feeds in your google reader... relevant? Helpful? Sssssssssshhhhhhhh...

Next time you really want to subscribe a feed... do this...

Categorize the Feed readers

a. Google for Personal feeds

b. Bloglines for Technology feeds

c. Some other reader for Personality development feeds

Now sub categorize them

By Author , By Relevance..

Use tools like Remember the Milk to put tasks for yourself to feed read... once a week. Last I had a big laugh was when a developer in the interview told me that he reads 200 blogs a day... wow.I asked when do you work?

3. Emails are fabolous, categorize them?

Yes our Bosses, Collegeues , Friends are cruel.. they send you thousands of emails. Distribute your emails in various categorize... if you receive thousands of forum posts , newsletters , subscription emails over your email, put filters on it.. again don’t read them every week... prioritize them.

But you are not Bruce Almighty that you can create an easy way of organizing your prayers ;)

4. Twitter is blood and oxygen, protect it?

Heard of twitter lists? Yesterday I went back and cleaned all my followers I do this on my feeds, blogs, chat clients, twitter and FB accounts. Clean em up. Find the relevant friends and keep them up. Mark Ramskill wrote an amazing post on this here http://www.twitip.com/why-it-pays-to-purge-when-and-how-to-unfollow/

See who you are following, manage them. Use tools like twittergrader to manage followers. Twitter had spam attacks in the past.. don’t just click on every link that comes from people you follow without knowing them.

5. When do I have time? I am a Knowledgolcoholic

Of course a day is just 25 hrs, the extra hour is what you need to do this.. now if you keep yourself well organized you may find time between:

10 hours at work

2 hours to travel

8 hours sleep

2 hours with family

2 hours for food and other activities

Just think that if you know more would help you.. but if you have more you cant know more.. you will always have a bucket thats overflowing...