It has been a month since I read The Secret to Digital Sanity by Shelley Hayduk, one of PersonalBrain’s regular authors. In the article she discusses the difference between capture tools such a PersonalBrain or Evernote and flow tools of which twitter and Facebook are examples. The latter two deliver information not designed to be captured.
I’ve been following her ideas and have found the realisation that I don’t need to read every tweet or Facebook post very relaxing. If I miss a few days of tweets it is now common for me to swipe through all but the last 24 hours without any guilt. And, importantly without any major loss of information.
If there is something I need to capture or spend more time with then I use Twitterlator’s integration with Instapaper to save the link for later processing into PersonalBrain. A secondary reason for flicking things to Instapaper is that I find reading web pages on my iPhone annoyingly slow—the loading delay interrupts my flow.
So at the risk of me now interrupting your flow take a few minutes to read Shelley’s ideas on digital flow to keep yourself sane in the digital noise that now constantly surrounds us.