Overloaded

Recently I’ve been writing about information overload. That we should avoid it, select only the best information.

Oh well, I have overloaded myself recently.

I slept 24 hours over the last 2 days! From 8 PM till 8AM. Children don’t sleep that much. My last 2 days had been like: Wake up, shower, work, coffee, home, dinner, coffee, sleep.

Exciting, isn’t it?

For the past 2 days my memory was like ROM – Read Only Memory – mission was to think clearly. And of course I was like Pentium 4 class of processor – single threaded. No way of multitasking.

So what to do?

I thought that silent mode was enough to keep me out of distraction. First thing I did was removing Facebook app from my mobile devices.

If I think about it now, I had been checking it every time I had I had a spare moment. Waiting for coffee to be served? Quickly check Facebook. Waiting for server to reload data? Quickly check Facebook. Never ending check check check.

I follow quite a few blogs and other websites on FB, how to actually keep a track of them? I simply added to Feedly.

Feedly is RSS reader – put it simply – you dump there your favourite websites, and Feedly keeps track of all of them for you, keeping record of all the new articles published on that websites. And you can browse them, whenever you’d like to. Like an email – all messages are waiting for you in your mailbox, until you’ve got time to actually read them.

Biggest time eater sorted out, what’s next? Notifications on the phone. I just killed them all for all the apps. Do I really need to know about train delays in the middle of the day? Or about another crisis in the world? No, certainly I don’t. I’ll find out when I’d like to.

And I’ve changed my organisation at work as well. I know it will probably sound cliché, but today I started using task feature in Outlook in a different way. Before I used to dump there all things I needed to do. Without dates, priorities, notes. And they had been sitting there. In a few cases – forever.

Today I’ve organised them by: today, this week, this month, next month. As simple as that. And guess what, I’ve completed all tasks schedule for today!

The best thing about it is I don’t need to think about them anymore. Plus, I don’t need to think about upcoming events foe the following weeks, because they are planned just for the next week.

Satisfaction from completing all planned tasks and having planned next week is obviously big, I know it was a good change.

A few little twists, and I feel like I’ve recovered plenty of time, as well as the control over it.

This is such a good feeling to be writing, I was feeling bad about myself over last 2 days, because I didn’t write a single word.