Winning the Clutter War by Sandra Felton

Author:Sandra Felton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9780800788094
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

16

Keeping Up with the Info Flow

The chief problem in today’s world is not information itself but the constant flow of information into our lives. Most of us Messies love information and let it flow unabated into our lives.

• We love it in the newspapers, magazines, on radio, on TV, and any other way it may be funneled into our lives.

• We even love receipts because they give us information about what we bought and when. They are moments of our lives crystallized on paper.

• We love old ads because they tell us how much things used to cost.

• We love books, especially hardbound ones, which are a cut above the paperbacks even if they are the same books. Once we read them, we have mixed our thoughts with them so they are even more

• We love what the mail carrier brings to our doors and what somebody sticks under our windshields while we are at the mall.

• We love computers with their extensive information holders like CD encyclopedias. Even if we don’t go looking for it, our friends and others forward information on our email. They send jokes, warnings, opportunities, inquiries. We can tap the motherlode of information, the internet. Using that little mouse and following the appropriate paths, we can find and print out reams of knowledge.

We are like hungry whales of inquiry gulping up tons of rich information plankton in a very big sea. Messies who are infoholics never seem to get full.

No generation previous to ours has had such access to so much. There has always been more information available than any one person could deal with. However, this is the first generation that has had to grapple with information overload from so many sources. We need to build boundaries to protect ourselves from information we don’t want and set up ways of first limiting and then handling information we may want.

Being curious, exuberant, vivacious people, Messies have special problems with setting these boundaries. Being disorganized people, we have trouble knowing what to do with the stuff we decide to keep.

Barney Fife used to tell Andy Griffith on The Andy Griffith Show, “Nip it! Nip it in the bud!” when confronting misbehavior he was afraid would burst into a crime wave. That needs to be our motto.

Please understand that it is not the papers that the information comes on that is the chief problem, though the paper is an additional complication. It is the information itself.

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