Managing LJjness

[thorfinn]

entrippy's entry about widespread LJ angst prompts me to push out a little bit on, as domesticmouse put it, "how to manage this info fire hose".

Firstly, groups and read filters are your friend. I have Humans, News, Comics, Sexual, Communities, and a filter I call "Quents". That last is the set of journals I read regularly. I've always felt that this LJ "Friend" thing is misnamed (and I do tend to rant about giving things correct names) - it really should be LJ "Acquaintance".

I have, currently, 188 people listed on my LJ Acquaintances list... and no way do I read all of them all of the time. And, no, I'm not going to reveal what proportion of people are in my Quents filter... but I will say that I regularly change who's on and not on that list, in response partly to how busy I am. One of the things that makes LJ great is that it is an unholy mess of individually self-defined communities... which partially intersect all over the place.

It reflects the "real world" in that way, much better than any blog does, and in a way, it's "tighter" than the real world, primarily because, I think, of the misnaming of LJ "Friends". That word has a lot of baggage with it, and as a result, people feel more obligation to pay attention to their entire "Friends" list, in a way that they would never feel in real life... or certainly not as strongly.

Nobody has infinite attentionspan (as anyone that's played any realtime strategy/tactics game knows), and we each need to focus that attention carefully. The concept of triage can come into play here. For those that haven't seen it described in full, the upshot, to use the canonical example of an extremely overloaded battlefield medical centre, is that you divide the incoming into three categories: [ Edited - I had categories 2 & 3 reversed ]

• 1. Going to die even with attention
• 2. Might survive if given some attention
• 3. Will survive without attention

What do you do then? You focus purely on category 2, with the direct and specific aim of moving them into category 3, then if you run out of category 2s, you attend to things in category 3... and you genuinely have to be "heartless" and decide to put some things in category 1. This principle can be applied to mostly anything where you need to allocate attentionspan. So, if you're finding yourself spending too much time and getting too stressed about your LJ Friends page... Do yourself a favour, create yourself some groups, and bookmark yourself a reading filter or three.

Oh, and I've asked a couple of people to interview me, but it's not likely I'll do anything with the questions until after the weekend...

Comments

[redcountess]

Interesting analogy of triage to friend filters :-) I've always had them for posting, but only recently for reading, after I found I was only scanning posts, even those I needed and wanted to read; and they do make a big difference to my concentration span and energy levels, something I'm sure lirion can relate to.

Hi, and *huggles* to y'all, btw *grin* (I can't believe I've actually proposed that me, SO and SO's SO pool our resources and buy a house possibly divided into two flats, down the track, depending on how things pan out).

[reddragdiva]

BTW, other people can see the names of your friends views if they're using web bugs and checking their logs. One should take care to give them innocuous names. Unless one really wants to make the point.

[thorfinn]

Err, yes. :) I forgot to mention that. Or else bookmark them by the magic number which you get if you click on the "..." next to the Friends link and select an entry.

Triage?

[lirion.livejournal.com]

2. Will survive without attention
3. Might survive with attention

Ummnn...unless you've mistyped something, surely you would be focussing on number 3, because the way it stands at the moment, the people listed in 2 are going to survive without attention anyway...

Re: Triage?

[jeshyr]

You beat me to it. I couldn't figure it out either.

Ricky

Re: Triage?

[thorfinn]

I have since edited the post - I had 2 and 3 reversed. Wups!

Thank you

[razorgirl-au.livejournal.com]

I'm relatively new to LJ. I had no idea about the "groups" feature/funtion.

Thank you so much!

:)