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Information Overload

massive swirl of books and notebooks in a vortex shape

A number of years ago, I took a time management course from Dave Crenshaw on LinkedIn Learning. He mentioned that one of the real impediments to getting things done is that we simply have too many gathering points. Being bombarded with email inboxes, voicemail, messaging applications, and more is overwhelming and doesn't allow us to process the information we have captured. David Allen also mentions this in Getting Things Done as corralling your "stuff." If you're looking for a good breakdown of this point, Thanh Pham at Asian Efficiency summarizes how this looks in life.

In relating this concept to books, I have been thinking about all the online accounts I have and how best to manage them. For instance, my oldest library inventory lives on LibraryThing where in a few years, I'll get a twenty-year badge (yikes!). This is my most comprehensive list in that it tracks every single book I own, along with all of my book ratings and reviews. It's also my favourite book-related site as their built-in scanner on the app is incredibly helpful for when I get book hauls on vacations!

Despite it being incredibly versatile as a site, I don't use LibraryThing to track what books I've read. Instead, I keep a notebook where I can record the books I've completed in order to know how many I read in a year in the easiest manner possible—no ratings, no comments, just the title and author. In the last couples of years, I've adopted Notion as a way to track what books to get so that I have a handy place to store information on upcoming releases and their current prices.

Because I've had LibraryThing for so long, I didn't bother with a Goodreads account until now. While I appreciate that it's community-oriented with a lot more reviews, it would essentially be another database to fill out. I may reconsider this decision as this is where most of the Bookstagram community seems to live, but I also have a hard time browsing Christian titles on there, especially when I access lists and they seem quite short 🤷

As I share more reviews on here, the thought has also crossed my mind on whether I should add them to other accounts. For LibraryThing ARCs, I will definitely do that, but since I review a lot of books that I don't own, I can see that muddying up my current inventory. Though I might be over-analyzing these logistical details, I share these thoughts because I want to centralize where all of my information comes from (my inputs) and where it lives (my outputs) in an effort to keep things simple. I imagine that applying this concept to life will help as well. (Can you tell I do a lot of this type of thinking in my work life?)

With books, I can see how there's a plethora of ways to celebrate them with the risk of going down many rabbit holes. I think that to keep things sustainable for now, I will likely limit my entries and ramblings to LibraryThing (my technical outlet), this blog (my functional outlet), and Instagram (my relational outlet). I hope it's a worthwhile journey 😄

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