Information Diet: Weekly Report

If you’ve been following this blog for the last couple of weeks, you already know that Melodee Patterson has joined me in the battle against “infomania.” If you also read Melodee’s blog, you also know that she has thrown down the gauntlet and implied that I have not been trying hard enough to curb my addiction to information, so I am determined to demonstrate to her, myself, and the rest of the world that it’s simply not true!

Before sharing my progress to date, I’d like to explain that I have fairly good systems in place to ensure that my search for information doesn’t cut into time that should be spent working, relaxing, or sleeping. I have two folders in Outlook labelled “Reading – Business” and “Reading – Fun” where I immediately move any newsletters, jokes, or other emails that don’t require any action other than for me to read them. Many of these items get filed automatically by my Outlook Rules. I generally don’t even look in the Reading folders during the week, but find I can get through them fairly quickly each Saturday. However, since I was at the Hamilton Convention Centre last Saturday working on job fair preparations, and the previous Saturday was the Golden Horseshoe Virtual Assistants Group fall event, these folders had grown a little fuller than usual.

I consider clearing these folders a greater priority than dealing with the ebooks and audio recordings which are well organized on my hard drive, as described previously, so this past Saturday I sat down to deal with them. Here is what I accomplished:

• Read and/or deleted everything in my Reading folders, except for two messages about websites to join. I moved those to a separate folder to consider later.
• Unsubscribed from 9 mailing lists.
• Bookmarked a webpage with a lengthy list of links that was mentioned in an email I’ve been holding onto since April. I may or may not ever get around to checking out those links, but at least I got rid of the email!
• Listened to a recorded webinar from August and made notes. Left space at the bottom of my notes to record my action steps, as recommended by Marcia Francois. Entered those action steps on my to-do list.
• Resisted the temptation to sign up for a free SEO course that I would probably never get around to completing.

I did break down and download a free online business planning calendar offered by Internet Marketing coach Alice Seba, but I think I can justify that by saying that it’s not reading material, but a useful tool that I will be able to use to help me plan my blog posts and other activities. What’s even better is that I didn’t have to sign up for Alice’s mailing list to receive it!

Although I haven’t even touched the backlog of learning resources on my hard drive, I haven’t added to them either, so please be kind! I hope you will continue to support me on this journey, and maybe you’ll even decide to join me, as Melodee has done.