How I missed reading that blog post and lived to tell the tale

I have a confession. That blog post that everyone’s talking about? The one that has everyone all a’Twitter? Yea, I didn’t read it.

I meant to, I really did. I saw it in my RSS reader. I saw all the tweets and retweets and re-retweets. But I just didn’t get to it.  And, amazingly, I’m still here today.

Information is becoming more accessible . As a young(ish) communications professional, I find it amazing that I can tap into the collective knowledge of some of the brightest minds in my field. People who charge more money than I make in a year for a month’s worth of services  are giving away their secrets free. They blog, they tweet and I soak it all up.

But the information is as overwhelming as it is accessible. My RSS reader doesn’t seem to know when I’m taking a day off. It doesn’t realize that I have a day job that requires a great deal of my mental capacity. It doesn’t care that I try to stay off the grid as much as possible on Sundays. The internetz doesn’t care about my schedule.

The proliferation of Twitter only compounds this problem. Not just because people tend to be more prolific there than in their blogs (though they certainly do) – Twitter amps up the volume but it also makes information fleeting. I go to lunch and come back to over 200 tweets – and my network of 300-ish pales in comparison to that of some of the heavy hitters, whose followers and followees number in the thousands.

It’s impossible to keep up but the pressure to stay connected is immense, especially for those of us at the earlier end of the career timeline. Academics think they face the publish or perish dilemma? Try being an early-stage communications professional. If I miss the latest missive from Todd Defren or Chris Brogan, I’m going to be as obsolete as a first gen iPod (where’s your click wheel, loser?).

And yet, at some point, I came to terms with it. I realized that missing a post here and there really won’t grind my career to a halt. This isn’t high school, the bullies aren’t going to pants me if I confess that I didn’t see the latest episode of… erm… whatever the cool kids watched when I was in high school. If something really revolutionary is said or introduced, I’ll find out about it eventually.

We’ve been blessed with an incredible ability to connect with… well, almost everyone. Now we just need to become equally as proficient with the whole disconnecting thing too.

So how do you do it? How do you cope when the popular girls are all gabbing about that latest Aqua single?