Information.
We're drowning in the stuff. It includes our regular diet of journals, TV, radio and music, e-mails ranging from newsletters to our day-to-day business, and social media feeds. Finding yourself in the deep end of the information pool doesn't take very long.
At the Science Online 2012 Conference last week I joined the session 'Drowning in Information' led by Walter Jessen and Simon Frantz and it was clear from the discussion that lots of us feel that way and few people haver all the answers.  It seems that if we don't deal with the problem we're going to slip beneath the next wave of information and never re-surface.
First order of business maybe some drown-proofing by simply taking in less information. Cancel online and online subscriptions that you don't need or read. I decided to undertake the cleanup exercise a while ago and have unsubscribed from several digests, newsletters, and Google Alert coming into my Inbox. Many of my remaining alerts and feeds are channeled into my iGoogle Home Page which at least gets it out of my e-mail and integrates it into my browser home page. Mostly what is left in the Inbox are BioSmartBrief,  GenomeWeb Daily News (these 2 are both customizable in themselves), The Hill Times ( a paid subscription), the POLITICO Playbook and a few similar beasts that are not daily intrusions.  

Then the session came to the tools we can use. Oh, the tools, tools, tools.

I don't know about you, but over the years I've tried a stack of organizational tools and techniques. I've tried organizing folders better in Outlook and on my PC, being more diligent about file tags to make searching easier, used organizing software such as One Note ( which I have stuck with as it now syncs with my iPad ) and all sorts of toys that have come and gone. Someone in the session made a good point about the software tools - you have to give them a chance. Give them a real workout for at least 30 days and if you find it isn't making information management easier or you haven't used it regularly, get rid of it. I did an iPad purge earlier based on that notion and while waiting for cancelled flights to be re-booked on the way home form the conference, did a quick sweep of my laptop and Blackberry. It is Monday and I'm not in an information blackout panic. 
I kept my BlackBerry News Feeds because it is easy to ignore when you don't have time to read, quick to update when you really do want to get the latest news, and if you take time to set it up properly doesn't suck up space or data.  Same for the NY Times app on the iPad. Yes it is another paid subscription but you get quality reporting and writing and the iPad app only does what you want it to to with minimum of fuss and bandwidth. 

A couple of other things struck me at the session that we should all give some thought.  One attendee mentioned that people rely on her to pass along information and that took time to manage. I would counter that as we look at our Twitter feed, Facebook page, or blog page, we seem to drift into another world at time where we see ourselves as the central character. Do people really rely on us for information? Would there be an information deficit if we didn't re-tweet the same information down the same #hashtag pipe over and over? A one paragraph teaser with lots of links on our blog page to ensure the search engine doesn't forget us may very well be good for the ego, but have we enlightened anyone with it?  I suggest not and if we overcame our over-sharing we'd be able to clear a little more of the information clutter from our lives.
This session at Science Online was no different than many other conference I attend or speak at with a sea of opened laptops in the room, eyes down on tablets, and thumbs jabbing away on smartphones. Every poke of the keyboard or screen was pushing information out , usually with no added value or context  and much of it tagged the same way by everyone, Those tweets and notes were adding to our information management issues and to the flow of everyone connected to us. All this taking place at a session on information overload.  Seems to me the fundamental challenge is to try to understand and learn and not simply be an information conduit.

There was no shortage of good idea and things to try, mostly based around new tools. With the caveat in mind that I'm giving you more information now and that if you are going to try it you must promise to really try it or lose it, here are a few of the mentions:

• If This Then That:  http://ifttt.com/wtf   This site got a lot of good reviews in the room and the moderator Walter Jessen was high on it. The key seems to lie in making sure you have it customized and set to do your bidding or you'll just be creating another information digest. Basically it lets you organize and aggregate into one place
• Read Cube http://www.readcube.com/   Helps collect research articles and make them searchable. Downloadable for PC and Mac. 
• Pomodoro is not a software tool but rather a technique to keep you on the straight and narrow info-path. There are lots of software bit and pieces and in the Google Chrome extension I found one that I have added to my toolbar and I'll give it a try for a month or so.. It is based around 25 minute blocks of time during which you focus on one task.
• The Information Diet by Clay Johnson is a book and idea that got a lot of good reviews in the session.  Based on a quick look I think it has a lot of promise and offers lots to consider as you try to fix your information flow.
• Diigo  is a web bookmarking and sharing tool much like Delicious. If you don't use Dig or Delicious or similar tools, no need to try Diigo. If you want to try another alternative it is worth a look.
• DEVONThink is a document management tool for Mac users. Looks interesting and if I was a complete Mac user I might be trying it out by now. 
• Evernote  -  You can't talk about information management and not mention Evernote. It works on a variety of platforms and devices, users love it, and has lots of features for taking notes, organizing information, linking information together, clipping web pages and it is free. The only reason I don't use it is because I started using Micrsoft OneNote before Evernote was born and never tried switching.
• OneNote -  OneNote isn't free and it doesn't have Evernote's cool factor ( it is Micrsoft after all ). However it does most of what Evernote does and some thing it doesn't and integrates with other MS products like Outlook. There is a 3rd party iPad app from MobileNoter to link it to your iPad and both perform as advertised.  It does everything I want it to do. 
• Flipboard is largely built around social media and gets good reviews. I tried it on my iPad and deleted it pretty quickly. It is build largely around social media and I have enough social tools that this was just one more - though with a really nice interface and look. It also tended to be a bandwidth hog and I don't live on a big city Internet connection and it didn't work well when you were offline - like on an airplane.  
• Zotero is a tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research sources. It works inside your browser and I may try this one. Anything that integrates with your browser I think is a bonus because it starts to pull your information together and not have you flipping between programs. 
• Picasa is a Google owned free piece of software for organizing images online, offline and on the web. There is a desktop client which helps you organize your computer or even a small network and a website that you can set to match the same structure as the client.  You can share from the website, upload and download easily, and do some limited editing of images. We make most of our images available on the site for anyone to use and we upload in full resolution so even media can use the material for print.