I don’t know about you, but I struggle to keep on top of the many things that are published and discussed about topics that I find interesting. Many smarter people than I have come up with ways of managing information overload. For example, The Getting Things Done methodology of David Allen is well regarded and probably works very well. I bought the book in 2006 and never got past the first chapter. Not because it was boring, because I didn’t find a way to make the time to properly engage with it.

I spend a lot of time online, and constantly come across things of interest. I favourite them on Twitter, but rarely go back and look at them. I capture them to Delicious, Pocket, Springpad, Evernote, Endnote… I’ve tried them all and never found something that works for me. As a researcher I need to be good at this. I was good at it when I did my PhD, and had to focus on only one or two core topics for a 3-4 year period. Working life, particularly in the private sector doesn’t encourage this kind of focus unless you are a specialist.

What’s my problem?!? I have every tool I need to organise this but haven’t made it work.

One issue I see is the problem of depth of processing. Using the tools above, and Google, I can find and curate thousands of resources into categories and topics – but that’s not the same as processing them. It’s a bit like when I used to do literature searches, print the articles but rarely read them in full. Printing an article is not reading it, nor is bookmarking a link really processing it.

So how am I planning to fix this? By having a top five. It’s just an idea at the moment, and probably one that others have thought of before. Here’s how I think it will work.

For every topic I am interested in, or is important in my practice, I will have a post on this blog. Just one post per topic. In this post, I will link to and critique, or at least summarise, no more than five resources at one time. Only five. In order to make it to the top five, I’ll have to actually process it to a certain depth. I can probably quickly discount many with a quick scan, others that take my interest or say something important can make the list. If I get more than five, one needs to come off the list. (I will probably cheat and keep an archive of those that get knocked out over time).

Why five? Well, it’s a popular number in lists. In terms of working memory, it’s a bit of a magic number, being the lower bound of the famous “Magic Number Seven (plus or minus two)“. By rights, if pushed, I should be able to recall the main points from 5 different resources on the same topic. Any more than that and things get fuzzy.

So, in due course, a new page on this blog will emerge, called topics. In it, posts about things i’m currently investigating or interested in. In each post, the top five resources. Let’s see how this goes.