How to Keep Up? How to Get Ahead?

As I am riding the train this morning doing a little computing work I am puzzling over the questions of How to Keep Up and How to Get Ahead? What I mean by those questions is how to get the information that is meaningful to prevent becoming obsolete and also how to use that information to get ahead.

It's all about knowledge. Information. Not simply data blasted at you from a variety of sources. I have somewhat of an advantage because one of my strengths is INPUT. It is true that I seek input by the truckload. Much of it can be quite random and useless if I let it. I like to read science fiction. I like to watch cooking shows. I like to watch shows about how to make things, how things work, and the way things got to be the way things are. I like to discover, learn, and understand. Mostly I like to synthesize new understanding or new application of knowledge.

But how can I possibly keep up? I am a member of about a dozen list-servs offering information daily about IT, leadership, management, and a variety of other topics. My email is regularly overloaded with snippets of information I hate to filter out but I rarely have enough time to review or read. I feel like I am drinking from a fire-hose of data, knowing there is important stuff in there if I had the way to process it better, not just faster but with more depth of understanding.

Maybe there should be a page rank value assigned to data or information so a person could know better what the value is of the data coming in. Who knows? If anyone out there in blog-land has ideas, let us know. For now, I have to continue trying to sift and sift and sift. The image of the gold prospector comes to mind. It seems I am sifting the Sahara Desert, though. With more and more coming each and every day.