In one of her recent posts on her personal blog the FT's Izabella Kaminska commented en passant on keeping up with the flow of information. It can seem overwhelming at times but it's pretty much the essence of the Information Age.
The thing to do is avoid wasting the time you have and that means employing a range of hacks: From paying people to pre-screen what you focus on to constantly asking yourself if the task at hand is the highest value use of your time. It's not easy and it does take some effort because the tendency of the universe is towards entropy and people are lazy but it does not kill one to absorb large amounts of information and convert the info into knowledge and hopefully wisdom.
From Dizzynomics:
The human information processing bottleneck
....P.S. I’m also increasingly worried by the fact that every day I seem to be processing a smaller share of the total information I intend to process, largely because the total share is growing exponentially. I can’t be the only one who has roughly 3 years of non-stop reading accumulated in my inbox, reader, to read list?
I think I have mentioned a few times that it was curiosity about everything that drove me to journalism. And also that as a little girl I dreamed of obtaining a giant book with the answers to all my questions.
I’ve just realised that such a book would be entirely pointless since it would probably take multiple lifetimes to read/process it....MOREA bit more in depth was her "Stop the news flow I want to hide in a cave"
Here's her latest at Dizzynomics home.
Just to inspire everyone, here's Amos Urban Shirk, the guy who read all 23 volumes of the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Then, in 1938, the New Yorker reported, he had begun reading the 14th edition, saying he found it a "big improvement" over the 11th, and saying that "most of the material had been completely rewritten".
*Back in 2007 we introduced our readers to old Doc MacKay in the post "Sustainable Energy-without the hot air":
Who better than a Cambridge physics professor to hang out with this weekend? Well maybe a few folks come to mind .
Many years ago a very old and wise and rich speculator said to me "There's time enough to do anything, there's not time enough to do everything, you have to make decisions".Possibly also of interest:
I've made my decision....
Emanuel Derman: "Money Changes Everything?" or Spinoza on Pain, Pleasure and Desire
The Case for Less: Is Abundance Really the Solution to Our Problems?
