Dealing with your cognitive load

It’s grant proposal season, so I’ve been quiet. But no longer!

I was having coffee with Loic Tallon a couple of weeks ago when he was passing through town, and our conversation had turned to Google+ and what it was good for, whether it was viable, etc… I’m sure many of you have been having the same conversation. We both felt at  least part of Google+’s appeal was that it was small, the same way Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc… all used to be small enough to be manageable.  It was interesting to me that we very quickly turned to the topic of general information consumption strategies, and I realized I had one, but I’d never really articulated it. It was an outgrowth of the path I’d taken through the technology jungle.  Loic was interested in how I managed and I was interested in how he coped, especially since he gets around a lot more than I do.

So, I want to try an experiment with you good people. If you had a few moments to spare in your busy lives, would you be interested in sharing with me your information consumption strategies? What social networks do you use, what do you use them for, when do you use them? How do you keep track of the delicious morsels people lead you to online? Do you treat that repository (or repositories) like a garden (pulling out weeds and dead things) or like a vault (it all goes in, nothing comes out)?  I’ll put together a post that combines the answers.  You can leave comments below or email them to me at erodley at gmail dot com.

To give you an idea of what I’m looking for, here’s my partial modus operandi. More will follow later.

Networks

I tend to use Twitter as a primarily professional network. It’s where a lot of my networking happens and where I do most of my informal professional development. Beth Kanter has a great post on personal professional learning.  You should read it. Tweets that point to interesting resources get favorited, and when time allows, I go check them out.  If they seem like they’ll have long term usefulness, they get saved as PDFs and saved to my Mendeley reference manager, with a link to the original URL. That way, when (not if) the URL stops working I still have the goods.  Lately, I’ve gotten even fancier, and use Readability to strip out all the junk and save only the main content, before I turn it into a PDF.

Facebook is primarily a personal space for me; friends and family.  The boundary is never clean though.  There are some people in my professional network who are more Facebook people, and there are friends who live on Twitter.  Such is life.

LinkedIn is an interesting case. I don’t think I’ve used it for anything, but it is a useful landmark, it seems. If I were job hunting or doing more consulting I can see that it might be more useful, but for now…  I try hard to only add people my network whom I’ve met at least once. That seems to keep the list reasonably short. And it is useful to see when friends have changed jobs.  Sometimes, I cross post there from Twitter.

Google+ is still an open question. Aside from being small (at the moment) I haven’t found the thing about it that would make we add it to my stable of networks, or ditch an existing to move to +.  The design and UI are certainly appealing, but is that enough?

Other things I’m interested in include Repositories (like del.icio.us and Flickr) and Habits and best practices.  So let me know. How do you swim in the sea of information?