I wake up far too early many weekend mornings - sleeping in for me usually means around 6:30am - and try to use the time to catch-up on news/feed reading that I’ve missed during the week.  My weekday mornings are usually spent focused on making sure I’m up on the daily cleantech industry news, but my weekend is when I catch up on my fill of larger technology venture world, politics, etc.

When you can take the time to broaden your lens, so many interesting patterns begin to emerge.  I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about potential models for providing valuable industry data in the cleantech space and when I poke my head up to look at how companies are tackling this challenge in retail or financial services, I can learn so much. 

The anxiety comes from opening my feed reader and seeing hundreds of unopened items, information that I couldn’t possibly, humanly consume.  Yet, for me, all of these unopened items are potential missed opportunities.  I know that we’re lost in a world of information overload that can be both paralyzing, yet empowering and it is this conflict that I am constantly trying to reconcile.

I’m reading Marc Lesser’s “Less: Accomplishing More By Doing Less” and it has some very insightful observations on focus in our modern world.  Marc is a Buddhist monk turned MBA-entrepreneur and it is one of the first books in this genre that I haven’t written off as entirely cliche.  He presents a balanced perspective that sympathizes with a type-A striving desire to consume as much information as possible with some strategies for ensuring that you are actually mindfully processing that data.

I still haven’t found the right balance and I still stare at those unopened stories with a sense of not having enough time and a sense that I am missing something, but I am certainly trying to find a way to most effectively monitor, synthesize, and react to what is out there.  Anyone with suggestions, technology tools, organizational methods, etc. - please feel free to send them along!