Two ways of getting information, and personal effectiveness

There are two ways of get­ting infor­ma­tion: active and passive. Let’s call them “request” and “push”.

You get infor­ma­tion actively (request) when you go look­ing for mate­r­ial on a sub­ject that inter­ests you: online, say, or in a library, or simply by asking people you know.

You get it pas­sively (push) when some­one presents it to you with­out your per­mis­sion and makes you pay atten­tion to it. That’s every kind of adver­tis­ing (out­door ads above all), and acquain­tances who ask a lot of ques­tions and gen­er­ally say too much :) Push is a kind of vio­lence: you didn’t ask, and still some­one shoves some­thing at you, like a market trader: “Hey, look at this peach! Not a peach, a booty!” ;)

So, to “be effec­tive” (sorry, I couldn’t think of a better phrase), you need to stop the push stream, or take it under your control.

First, mes­sen­gers! ICQ, Skype, Google Talk, the chats on Facebook and VKontakte all deliver infor­ma­tion by push. You can save a good deal of time by using email instead of ICQ. You can set aside the most con­ve­nient time for email, and you won’t have to keep answer­ing ques­tions like “how are you?” and “what are you up to?”.

Second, email shouldn’t be checked auto­mat­i­cally every N minutes. I know from my own expe­ri­ence how much that dis­tracts from the task at hand. Better to switch auto­matic check­ing off altogether.

Steve Pavlina, for exam­ple, advises check­ing email at the end of the work­ing day, not at the start. Roughly speak­ing, you’ll be more tired then and will get it over with faster.

Third, RSS. You put together your own stream of the infor­ma­tion that’s useful to you, with­out being dis­tracted by things that don’t matter.¹

I think I’ll add to this list in the future.