I am an information addict.  There, I said it.  I’m not afraid to admit that I have a problem. I come by it honestly, though, as one of my hobbies as a child was reading encyclopedias (mostly because we didn’t have a television, but that is another blog post).

The Internet is an enabler for someone like me.  Anytime I want to know more about a particular subject, I can google it or hit the wikipedia (which in many cases leads me down a rabbit trail of information discovery).

In way, its not all that bad, because I am continuing to learn, and learning is a key to keeping the brain active and healthy.

Where it did become a problem for me was that a lot of that information came to me in the form of RSS feeds in Google Reader (of course I DID subscribe to them).  I was easily getting upwards of 2000 entries in my Google Reader feed everyday at one point.  Combine that with following several very active twitter users, and I was hitting information overload.

With all of that information capitalizing on my time, just getting through it was taking away from the things that I want to do more, like blogging, for instance.  It was also stressful for me, because an unread item in my feed was to me an undone task on the to-do list. Getting that additional time and lowering the stress level of my life were enough of a motivation to reevaluate my habits.

So I took some steps to start cutting down on the noise.  I realized that there were hundreds of entries that I was never looking at, outside of scrolling past them in the feed. There were several hundred more that were really of no informational value at all (funny pictures or videos, and the like).  And there were several blogs with multiple posts per day, that I was not actually reading, other than skimming through them.  It was wasting my time to bother even scrolling past them.

It was somewhat painful, but I eventually made some very large cuts.  The first thing to go was the junk.  Sure, it was entertaining at times, but not always useful.  Next, I cut out the blogs I wasn’t reading regularly.  I also trimmed down my news feeds to only the top stories from two major sources.

Now, the majority of my feed subscriptions are from people – bloggers that I actually read and interact with through comments – who I feel are making positive impacts, and are sparking valuable conversation.

I’ve also made a personal commitment to continue to fine-tune my information gathering, to make the best use of my time going forward.  It’s an ongoing process, but I am already seeing the results, and if you’re reading this, you are too.