The hardest thing I have to do every day is to decide what to ignore

What a great line:

The hardest thing I have to do every day is to decide what to ignore.

This comes from Jeremy Zawodny.

He goes on to say:

I need to invert my thinking. I should be starting most days with a strong idea in mind of what I want to spent the majority of the day focusing on. If there's time left, I'll tend to the other distractions.

This has implications for both business and media consumption:

Business

Jeremy is correct. We must define our scope of interest first, and then make intelligent decisions about what to pay attention to.

That's what Touchstone does with APML. Your APML file (generated by Touchstone or any other APML compatible service) describes your scope of interest. Toucstone then ranks and filers incoming information for you against that profile.

Jeremy I'd be happy to give you a Beta Invite - drop me a line.

Some might say that this approach limits spontaneity or serendipidy. I'd argue that if you want spontaneity check Tailrank or Techmeme or Digg - they are fantastic Popularity/Meme Engines.

If you want a productive awareness of what you do all day, you need an Attention Management Engine.

Media:
Now some might say this sounds all academic and very 'Business Productivity' focused. But the reality is that this applies to media consumption as well. With a growing underbelly of great niche content, it is becoming very difficult for content creators to find an audience and audiences (or should we say participants) are finding it increasingly hard to pick the right entertainment experiences from a huge range of possible choices.


Thanks to Paul for pointing me to this post