I just saw this today after reading Franz P.’s comment about how he found my post. I did a search for “information overload” to see if I could find my post on Google. I looked through the first five pages and didn’t see my post, but I did find this:

Cure Information Overload Using Google Reader

Google’s feed reader has an option to sort the feeds by relevance. It’s only available if you go to “All items” and select “Sort by auto”. The cryptic name should mean that Google Reader “prioritizes the items based on their importance to you” by analyzing your reading patterns. - googlesystem.blogspot.com

I’ve noticed that I easily get distracted from what I’m doing when on my computer, be it reading my emails, school work, or other important things. I also tend to spend too much time reading interesting and informative articles online. And to top things off, I feel this compulsion to read every single new item in my RSS feed reader, and not just hitting the “mark as read” button after spending several hours trying to read it all. Too much of a good thing - too much information…

Wired is reporting that information overload is being predicted by some analysts as the problem of the year for 2008. “‘It’s too much information. It’s too many interruptions. It’s too much lost time,’ Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. ‘It’s always too much of a good thing.’ Information overload isn’t exactly new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available, he said, also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/26/2038218

I just turned off the web clips in my Gmail account, and I’m going to unsubscribe from the high-volume news feeds and try to be very selective in the feeds that I have, and I’ll probably limit my weekly time spent on feed reeding and extraneous browsing to 2 hours a week or less (for starters)…