Sometimes, the web can be very aptly named. Before you know it, you are caught in it, stuck on an endless treadmill of checking tweets, work email and personal email accounts, with multiple tabs open in your web browser as you try and keep up to date with the masses of content being generated.
Faced with this barrage of content, questions and ideas generated by all this can easily get lost. It's a fact that digital can mean information overload – but it doesn't have to be like that.
Tools exist to help, but before examining these in more detail it is first necessary to state the obvious: switch off. Google's 70/20/10 model deliberately asks its employees to switch off from their main projects for 10% of the time in order to maximise their productivity.
Your organisation does not have to adopt this model for you to ensure you step away from your desk for 60 minutes each day. Block it out in your calendar if you have to, but take some time for your mind to wander.
Once you've given your brain some downtime, you may find lots of ideas, thoughts and questions coming to the fore, and this is where digital can be a help and not a hindrance. For ideas, mind mapping is a fantastic tool which allows you to quickly and easily produce what were once called spider diagrams. FreeMind is currently at the top of a lot of people's lists but Wikipedia's list of mind mapping software provides a good list of alternatives.
An example of a mind map
If you have the rather enviable problem of multiple devices such as iPads, smartphones and a desktop PC on your desk and a laptop at home, and want to store your ideas in one place accessible from all, MindMeister is one of the options available to you. Their free package has limitations but the ability to collaborate with others is not one of them. Support is not restricted to Apple devices either, with Android getting some love.
It's not just ideas and questions which need organising, however, if you're suffering from digital overload. It's all that data, the content which people relentlessly create and share. It can feel like an avalanche at times, especially when your job relies on you keeping up-to-date with digital developments.
Again, there are tools at hand. Despite an ownership change, Delicious is still most people's tool of choice for organising bookmarks. While bookmarking a webpage in Internet Explorer or other web browsers means you have to be on the same computer to retrieve it, Delicious means you can get at those bookmarks from anywhere.
Instapaper, which has apps across a number of different platforms performs a slightly different function, storing entire articles for you to retrieve later, even if you don't have a web connection – ideal for train journey reading where 3G connections can be patchy.
Within Twitter, no matter what you are using to read your tweets, there is the option to "favourite" tweets which link to more detailed content or which raise interesting points, again facilitating access at a later date when more time is available to devote to reading or thinking.
Evernote combines some of the functionality of Instapaper in that it allows you to clip content out of webpages to save and refer to later, but it also acts as a cross platform note taker with support for almost all smartphones, tablets and laptop operating systems.
Just a few ideas for avoiding digital overload, after all the web should be there to inspire us, not drown us. What do you use to keep on top of the latest information? Are there any particular apps or working methods which you employ? Tell us in the comments below.
Louise Kidney works in the communications team at Blackburn with Darwen borough council and blogs at ashinyworld.blogspot.com
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