I have this problem.

First, there isn’t enough time in the day to see, touch, handle and complete all the things I want.

Second, after handling what I can, there isn’t near enough time to explore and learn about all the new things in the world that I feel I need to know, much less master.

Finally, all my digital tools buzz, ping, pop, ring and purr morning, noon and night. So I’m constantly chasing shiny new emails, news snippets, blog articles, instant messages, social media updates and tweets or some such.

I’ve tried turning things off, but breaking up is really hard to do. I don’t have the willpower to stop. Help!

Sound familiar?

Overwhelmed from all the news, information and communications coming at us from every conceivable direction is a very common complaint. The answer, unfortunately, is elusive.

Your Priorities Have Become My Priorities

Most of us have tried hiding things, pushing them aside (there’s an app for that) or simply turning them off just to have someone call or drop by our office to mildly complain that you haven’t replied to that urgent email message they sent 10 minutes ago. When did our world become immediate response and instant attention? When did your priorities instantly become my priorities? Well, when we turned on all those wonderful instant access tools and kept them on 20 hours a day. When we put a powerful business and personal tool in our pocket or purse and listened all day and night long just waiting for it to chirp. By using all the wonderful digital and mobile tools available to us and responding so quickly when touched, we set up the expectation that we will always respond immediately when pinged or buzzed or popped or whirred.

Once the expectation is set, turning off the tools so we can control what gets through just creates confusion and sometimes concern in the people with whom we most often communicate. Going AWOL, it seems, often generates enough concern that friends and associates hunt you down just to make sure you’re OK.

So, leaving all your digital tools turned on creates an unproductive level of distraction and turning them off creates another level of urgent communications asking you why you didn’t respond quickly to that urgent message. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Now let’s add another dimension to this dilemma — lost productivity. The degree of distraction costs your employer dearly. In a recent Mashable article, Soren Gordhamer quotes a harmon.ie survey saying that the average worker loses $10,375 each year being constantly sidetracked. So the problem is not just yours, but theirs as well.

Manage the Pops, Pings and Whirrs

Just like ringtones can be used on your phone to tell you who is calling, similar tones can be used on your computer to tell you who is emailing. For example, I define a certain sound for emails coming from my clients, a different sound for messages from QSI staff, students, family and close friends and no sound for the rest. I turn off all those bouncing icons, quick alerts and other distractions meant to alert me to an incoming message and depend solely on the sounds to tell me who’s emailing.

I clear my email first thing in the morning and last thing before I leave. And in between I listen for the sounds that tell me something important has happened.

One App to Rule Them All

Social media? Well, I squelch all the sounds and alerts and will myself not to look every few minutes. One great trick is to consolidate all my important social media into one place so I can quickly scan incoming Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin updates. Hootsuite is my tool for that job, and works well as long as I don’t keep it in front of my face for too long (shiny baubles, oh, oh, look!). I lose a little functionality, but not the gist of the social flow I follow.

Finally, I have an incoming ringtone for everyone important in my phone. They are not all unique, but anything outside of my standard ringtone means that the call is important. Everything else goes to voicemail. They’ll call back if it’s really that important.

My controls are not brain surgery, just common sense. But as the digital tools we use get smarter, more pervasive and intrusive, common sense may just be our best defense.

Until next time — may all the good news you read be true.

steve