You can't know everything

Photo by Branimir from Flickr

I'm interested in the way people keep up-to-date professionally, whether it be by tweets, RSS or email lists.  I'm sure you could spend most of your working day keeping up-to-date.  In fact I get the impression that's essentially what some people do!


My main problem is how you keep up-to-date with keeping up to date.  That is the reason I gave up on Twitter because it became too much and I just didn't have time to either read all the Tweets or tweet myself.
I have since stepped back onto the tweeting arena, but can imagine that come September it will be another 10 months until I have time to resurface into said arena again.

The things is when I'm not tweeting or when I ignore my RSS feeds for a month I don't feel like I am missing out.  There are of course the odd thing you don't pick up on until way after everyone else, but generally my motto is "you can't know everything".  And it's stood me in good stead so far in my career!

There are so many technologies around and new ones emerging that it would be silly to try and learn them all.  I sometimes feel that Librarians are scared of missing out on something in case they get left behind.  When in fact you can end up confusing users if you're forever chopping and changing your services/technologies. 

So my advice to those of you suffering with 'information overload' is to chill out a bit.  It's ok not to know it all.