Information Flood Management

Today, I almost constantly feel overwhelmed by all the information, messages, and questions I get flooded with each day. Mails, bug reports, blogs, ICQ messages, phone calls, shoulder tapping, etc. I still haven't quite figured out how to manage and control this flood of information input and the right tools are definitely only part of the solution. I think it's more a human problem than a technical problem of how to handle this situation. But the right tools definitely help.

Google I use to actively find information. Their concept of a simple search UI with a smart and powerful search engine behind it has definitely revolutionized the way many search UIs work today. By the way, TwinEngine, formerly known as YaGooHoo!gle, is as simple as it is interesting.

GoogleDesktopSearch is the tool I use to search my local harddisk for mails and documents. It's super-fast and very easy to configure and use (as expected from a Google product). Often, I even prefer this tool to the built-in search of mail and web clients.

Firefox is the browser I use to browse the web. No more IE, no more Opera. Firefox is slim, fast, and I love the Themes/Extensions concept, e.g. the Web Developer extension is great.

OmeaReader by JetBrains is my favourite tool to handle the RSS feeds from blogs and newsletters that I have subscribed to (unfortunately, it only runs on Windows, yet). It's free, fast, and very configurable. The Clipping and Annotation features are cool, too. Thunderbird's RSS support would probably suffice but as a big fan of JetBrains products it's clear I go with OmeaReader.

Tadalist by 37signals is a neat little web application to keep my todos uptodate. I love their idea of removing as many features as possible instead of adding more features than needed. By the way, 37signals is the company that developed the CodeZoo website.

JIRA by Atlassian is what we use for bug tracking at the company I work for. It's the best bug tracking tool out there that I can imagine. Period. One could write a whole separate blog covering the functionality.