Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 47: Sentence Stuff to Death Row

Level Easy

Platform All

Cost Free

Endless streams of information compete for your attention. RSS feeds, mailing lists, and news sites are all great ways to keep up with what’s going on in the world and within your industry. However, because putting your ear to yet another new information channel is so easy, it’s equally easy to find yourself swimming in a sea of unread items that pile up while you focus on other things. Prune your information channels down to the ones most worth your time to keep up a solid attention firewall. One technique for doing so, coined by blogger Michael Hyatt, involves sentencing certain information streams to a virtual “death row.”

Maybe it’s the mailing list you once enjoyed but that has become more boring than informative. Maybe it’s that weblog that seemed so fun and original six months ago that’s slowly lost your interest. Whether you’re decluttering your home or your digital space, sometimes it’s hard to know what you can safely toss and what to hang onto. A simple method for choosing what goes and what stays is to make a folder called death row on your hard drive, in your email program, or in your RSS reader — or all three. Place any feeds, lists, or files you’re not sure are useful to you anymore in there.

Give yourself six weeks. (Create a reminder in your calendar using the methods described in Hack 33: “Send Reminders to Your Future Self.”) If within that time, you never looked up something in that feed, ...