I recently went on holiday. To Spain. It was good.

Apart from it took me about four days to switch out of work mode. Constantly worrying about checking my mail. Has Basecamp been updated? What’s happening on Twitter? Given that I was only away for seven days, four days in work mode was not the best.

I made up my mind to try and keep things under control from now on. After a day of work, switch off. No reading blog entries, no checking emails, no tweets. Do something else, talk to a person who is physically present, watch the TV (OK, maybe that’s pushing it), play the guitar, get mauled by the cat. Just stop thinking about work!

Then, on my return, I was faced with the prospect of opening my FeedReader.

I remembered how my heart would sink when, opening it on a morning would reveal a red badge with a three digit number in it. “500 unread articles? I’ve only been asleep for six hours. It will take me that long to plough through those articles!” Imagine the unread count after being away for a week

I didn’t want to go back there.

So I made the choice not to open it. Ever.

Two weeks in and I don’t miss it.

I’ve got podcasts for the car through iTunes (yeah yeah, a glorified feed reader, but with six or seven “unread” items, not thousands).

I’ve got Northpack.

I’ve got the Geekup mailing list.

And I’ve got Twitter.

Thank buggery for Twitter.

People are always posting links in their tweets. I don’t have to read them. I use Twitterific, so it pops up on-screen for a couple of seconds. If I miss it, I miss it. If I see it I can choose to look at the link or ignore it. Decision made in less than five seconds.

No stress about the stuff I’ve not yet looked at. No stress about the stuff I’ve missed. In fact, no stress at all.

That’s how I’ve been dealing with the overload. How do you manage it?