There are people out there who are even more information deluged than you are. Eleven of the smartest--and most beleaguered--reveal their personal regimens for keeping their heads above data.
Remember last year's Seagate Software campaign? Under the slogan "The Only Important Piece of Information Is the One You Need Right Now," the ads showed hapless souls (a guy wanting a description of his blind date, a groom looking for the wedding chapel) being showered with every possible response to their questions except the actual answers. It was a whimsical take on a serious business problem: people today are inundated with so much information that it's impairing their ability to make decisions, recognize what is significant, and even get a decent night's sleep. Here, survival strategies from some true information connoisseurs.
Esther Dyson
Chairman, EDventure Holdings
New York City
Why she's inundated: Dyson runs the PC Forum, high tech's premier conclave, and edits the newsletter Release 1.0.
First source for news each day: E-mail. "I currently have more than 1,000 E-mails in my in box, although I keep trying to work it down."
Why E-mail is her lifeline: "It connects me to individuals I want to talk to, usually answering and discussing the specific topics I'm interested in. And it's often stuff that you won't ever find in print or on the Web."
Source she's dropped: PC trade magazines. "I can find most of the stuff they print on-line or else I've already seen it in an E-mail."
Guilty pleasure: "I read Dear Abby and Ann Landers when I come across them."
On electronic mailing lists: "I find out about them from other people, usually. It's a good thing because there's someone out there filtering things for you and culling the best."
Coping strategy: Her home doesn't have a telephone line. "I spend so much time on the phone and E-mail at work, including personal stuff, that I like to be incommunicado at home."
Scott Adams
Creator, Dilbert
Danville, Calif.
Why he's inundated: Adams's book The Dilbert Principle was a number one New York Times best-seller. His current book is titled The Joy of Work. Adams encourages readers to contact him by E--mail through his Web site, which is listed in his books.
First source for news each day: CNBC, while he brews his morning coffee.
Regular reading: Adams loves magazines. (And we love him for saying so!) "They do the best job of putting the news and issues in context. Almost all other sources of news are context free, which makes them more harmful than useful."
Source he's dropped: "I rarely watch network news shows anymore. I already know all the news by the time those shows air."
Guilty pleasure: Every day, Adams goes on-line to check his investment portfolio at Microsoft Investor or Charles Schwab's site. "There's no real reason, except that it's fun to do."
Pet peeve: "E-mail spam is about 25% of all my E-mail now. It makes me nuts."
Andrew Tobias
Personal-finance writer
Miami
Why he's inundated: Tobias proffers personal-finance advice in magazines, in software, on the Web, on PBS's Beyond Wall Street, and in books.
First source for news each day: "The Today Show for its meatier segments--or else CNN."
Regular reading: The Wall Street Journal, followed by the New York Times, E-mail, and Yahoo!
Source he's dropped: "Anything that tries to help you beat the market--be they newsletters or magazine articles with titles like 'How to Speculate Without Risk' or anything like that."
Guilty pleasure: "When I am overloaded, I retreat into my own private computer-Scrabble zone."
Coping strategy: What to do about too-prolific E-mailers? "Many of them are brilliant and wonderful and well-meaning, so it's a little hard. But basically you just signal them by replying with ever shorter E-mails--my ultimate being, unsigned and in its entirety, 'Thx!'--which conveys that you do like them, hence the exclamation mark, but that you are just living in a different time frame than they are--you are getting 100 E-mails a day and can't possibly develop the kinds of correspondences you would like to."
Nicholas Negroponte
Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab
Cambridge, Mass.
Why he's inundated: Negroponte's position at MIT ensures that he knows nearly everyone and everything that's going on in high tech.
First source for news each day: "Unquestionably E-mail."
Why he loves E-mail: "Asynchrony. Time to reflect. The ability to do many things in the otherwise wasted interstices of life. It also makes some people more honest and bold."
Source he's dropped: Television. "It takes too much time for too little information except the breaking news. And even that is better served by the Web these days."
Guilty pleasures: "I read worldwide plane timetables. I love auction catalogs. And I am a sucker for action films."
Coping strategy: Negroponte makes and gets fewer than three phone calls a day. "Since I'm almost always in a different time zone or in orbit, using the telephone is real hard." But his aversion to the phone goes beyond convenience. "Most telephone calls are gratuitous in their need for real time. Huge amounts of effort are devoted to synchronizing yourselves for an exchange which usually can and should be asynchronous."
So whom does he talk to by phone? His 90-year-old broker.
Bob Bennett
U.S. senator from Utah
Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City
Why he's inundated: Bennett, a Republican, serves on several Senate committees, including Small Business; Appropriations; and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
Source he's dropped: Sunday-morning talk shows--"unless I'm actually on the shows."
Guilty pleasure: The Hotline, a Web-based daily briefing compiled by the National Journal Group. "I'll get in and start to feed. I'll be reading about governors' races in states that don't mean anything to me, and I'll waste 15 minutes when I should have been preparing for a hearing or a speech."
Pet peeve: What he calls "artificial balance." Bennett thinks that a lot of extremists get on TV just so journalists can say they've covered a variety of viewpoints. "A lot of times I'll see someone on TV and I'll think, 'If he were not on the other side of an issue, he wouldn't have any credibility at all as a source.' "
Coping strategy: "I'll go through my reading schedule, and if I need to read the Times and I only have so much time, I'll read the editorial page and glance at the national news and then throw it away quickly, so I don't get bogged down in sports."
David Brudnoy
Radio talk-show host, Boston University professor, and author
Boston
Why he's inundated: Brudnoy hosts five hours of talk radio five nights a week, sometimes chatting with presidential candidates in one segment and Oscar nominees in the next.
Guilty pleasures: The on-line tabloid The Drudge Report . Also, Politically Incorrect and The Oprah Winfrey Show.
