Be careful to not overeat.
I don’t want to dictate anyone which productivity system they should use. Just use what works for you, I happen to like a bastard of GTD and Pomodoro.
But there’s a trait I’ve seen at many ineffective people: information overflow. And I used to be one of them.
Do you know that anxiety that you could miss some important fact or news? Never mind everything important gets massaged through Twitter repeatedly? I’ve been there. Reading many reddits, Hacker News and all those blogs. Always having 100+ unread items in my Google Reader, dozens of tabs open in my browser and always feeling stressed about it.
And I can’t emphasize the last point enough: information overflow stressed me out.
Nowadays I fight it as good as I can. I regularly cull my feed list as well as my Following list on Twitter. I read Hacker Newsletter (a weekly digest) instead of Hacker News and reddit. Articles I deem worthy are added to my reading list instead of cluttering my browser.
Since enforcing this information policy I got a lot more productive and – what’s more important – a lot more relaxed at the same time.
