HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?

I tend to consider myself as someone who knows a bit about a lot of things and have a variety of interests, beyond my present position as a Special Education Teacher.

Since I have returned to teaching, I have noticed that I am constantly bombarded and overloaded with information at work and home.  This evening when I logged onto my computer for my evening update, I had 94 feeds in Google Reader and 17 more were added while I was reading those 94, 2 pages of Facebook posts unread and 300+ live news feeds, 52 emails (none related to work), the Twitter stream was going full force and my news feeds had way too many articles I hadn’t read. This was in addition to listening to NPR’s stream online. This may be typical for many out there, but it has become too much for me.

I have decided that the rest of this evening will be devoted to reducing the amount of information bombarding me.  That means I am going to do the following:

Twitter:  Reduce the number of people that I follow to about 100.  Yes, I know that the more people you follow, the more information you have available, but there is just too much information for me to digest what everyone is saying.  I love dipping into the stream, but I think that limiting it a bit will help me, it will be like going from a fast moving river to a slower moving stream.  So if you are someone that I unfollow, please don’t take it personally, I just can’t keep up.  If you wish to continue following me thank you.  I know that I will experience Twitter creep, but I just have to be vigilant.

gReader:  This is the biggest time hog, as a blogger, I feel a certain responsibility to read and comment on other blogs.  I know that I would want others to take the time to read my blog and comment.  Unfortunately, I find that instead of reading the blogs, I have subscribed to, I scan them quickly in gReader to see if one grabs my attention and if it does I open it in a new tab to read and/or comment or on.  This is unfair to the writers of the blogs that I follow, because I just don’t have the time to read what they have taken the time to write. 

My plan is to get gReader under 75 subscriptions tonight.  The hardest thing is that I keep finding new blogs that I really want to read.  So if I want to add a new blog subscription, I am going to have to delete one of the present ones left after the purge. 

Facebook: I only have 55 “friends” on Facebook but I had over 300+ items in my live news feed.  So I plan to either hide or delete a bunch of feeds and friends that I really don’t need to know what they are doing – again it is not personal just overload.

NPR:  Turn off the news stream and listen to music instead or just sit and not have any other streams going.

E-mail:  Unsubscribe to almost all of my subscriptions and weed out all the Store advertisements that I can.

I find that I spend over two hours a night just getting caught up on my nightly reading, I plan for this “purge” to get it down to under 1/2 hour an evening. 

If you are wondering how this relates to being a Special Education Teacher…I don’t start working on my school work until after 9:00 P.M., don’t get to bed until after 11:00 on most nights.  I then get up at 5:00 A.M.  This amounts to around 6 hours of sleep a night, which I am finding is not enough to be sharp day-in day-out in my classrooms.  I think it is called sleep deprivation, which will affect my ability to help my students and eventually my health.

Wish me luck and I will let you know how it goes.

[Via http://resource220.com]