Coping with the flood of information

This week I kept a little statistic about how many pages of information I received from Monday to Friday. I haven't counted anything that is directly related to my work.
Result:
In five days in pages (Din A4):
Magazines: 128
Cover letter by post: 15
Infomails: 28

A total of 171 pages.
Or 34 pages per day.

With a reading speed of about 3 minutes per page, I would be busy for 2 hours a day reading everything that people send me, because them think I should read it.

As I am and want to remain a free person, I have developed strategies for dealing with this so that I end up reading only what I enjoy or what helps me move forward.

Unsubscribe

About a year ago, the amount of info mails and info letters I received was almost three times as large. I radically cancelled all postal mailings and info mails that I no longer wanted to receive. And I don't miss anything.

You can do this with a short note: „For time reasons [or also: for ecological reasons] I would like to ask you to delete me from your mailing list and not to send me any more post/mails.“

Discard and delete

Things that you can recognise at first glance as containing no relevant information can be deleted immediately without reading. In the case of magazines that only contain partially relevant information, you can briefly leaf through the magazine, cut out the relevant articles and dispose of the rest straight away.

Protection from growing reading piles

It is best to dispose of one or two old magazines or articles as soon as you put a new magazine (or parts of it) on the reading pile. The likelihood of the old ones being read diminishes with every new piece of reading material that is added.
You can do the same in your email inbox - when a new info mail arrives that you actually want to read, delete two or three old ones that you thought you would read a few weeks ago.
Another option is to schedule time on a fixed day each week, e.g. Friday, to sort through, delete and throw away information. (However, I think it's better to do this as soon as possible).

With these measures, I have reduced the 128 pages to 40 that I would actually like to read.

Find the best reading times

Everyone has times when they like to read information. Some on the toilet, others during a break with a cup of coffee. I myself like to read when I'm on the underground or on the train. This has the nice side effect that you can dispose of the information you no longer need in the nearest wastepaper bin and continue travelling light.