Wiping the Slate

I read a fair number of blogs regularly. They bring insights, ideas, and sometimes inspiration into my life. The authors of these online repositories teach, cajole and invagle me to improve my life, my business and even my personal relationships.

And sometimes I just wish they'd cut it out!

Oh, I don't mean I want them to stop writing. That would be wrong. Every once in a while, though, I don't have a chance to read their pearls of wisdom. And that's when the trouble starts.

Many of you know that Lisa and I went on vacation to Hawaii this year. We had a great time, in part, because my laptop chose to die which meant I couldn't do any work. I also couldn't read my blogs. By the time I got back, I had close to one hundred blog postings to read. What plenty! What joy! What a pain in the butt.

I actually found myself avoiding my newsreader. Each time I looked, I had just as many or more posts to read than the time before. It became less about learning from these great teachers and more about just getting through the reading (kind of like high school was for many of us). I lost touch with Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki. The Brazen Careerist had to go on without me and Tom Peters only irritated me with his prolific posts.

Then it happened. I was just catching up on one of my favorite blogs (Scott Ginsberg's "HELLO My Name Is BLOG"). When I'm just reading one or two posts, I'll just use the Google Newsreader gadget for my Google Homepage. The gadget had recently gone through an overhaul and some of the controls had been moved around a bit. When I went to click on the "Refresh" link, I accidentally hit the "Mark all as read" link instead. Suddenly that list of hundreds of posts vanished. I had lost my place in the blogosphere.

And I felt great.

We so often accept stress and responsibility into our lives which has no real place in reality. Was Seth upset that I didn't read every one of his posts? Did Guy lose any sleep? I doubt it. Did I miss out on some good ideas? Probably. But, you know what? Those guys have a lot of good ideas and they will write many more in the future.

Now I'll look forward to reading them again.

So, how do you deal with the glut of online information? How do you say "no" to a good idea that doesn't fit?