Use The Library More

With difficult economic times people are cutting back on lots of things. This is a great time to rediscover your local library.

Let your magazine subscriptions lapse. Or most of them, or many of them. Do you really read them all anyway? Go to the library and spend an hour or two or three and read magazines there or take them out.

Stop renting films from Blockbuster and use the DVD rentals at your library. My local libarary rents family films for a week for free. Can't beat that price.

Read books. This is a perfect time to go back to reading as a form of recreation instead of video games or other expensive electronic items.

Read together as a family. Read to each other. Read the same book and talk about it. Redicover your connections to each other.

Go to free lectures, children's story hour or whatever else you library provides free of charge. Some libraries have a tremendous amount of programming, some don't. Check other libraries in your area and see if they have programming.

Libraries are a window onto the whole world.

Information Overload

We're all overloaded with too much information. Newspapers, magazines, email newsletters, books, mail, reports, endless amounts of stuff to read. It's happening to everyone in our society because of the explosion of knowledge and information and the ways it can all be easily accessed.

So it's not just you. Everyone has trouble keeping up. There is a frightening statistic that from the years 1750 to 1800 the amount of information in the world doubled. Today it's doubling at the rate of every 2-2 1/2 years and by 2031 will be doubling every 73 days.

How can anyone keep up with this? The answer is that you can't. But there are some ways to help make things more manageable.

*You'll never get to that gigantic "to read" pile so decide on a cut off. Let it be 3 or 6 months and if things are older than that throw them out. There is more stuff coming in every day and you'll just never get to it all. That's the reality. Not a reality you may want to hear but that's the truth.

*Set up a system of priority. Decide what's most important to you personally or professionally. Read that stuff first.

*When you get a magazine go through it right away and rip out the articles you want to read and throw out the magazine.

*Always carry reading material with you. You will be surprised at much downtime there can be waiting in lines, waiting in offices for appointments or other things. If you take with a plastic zippered bag of newspaper articles or a magazine or something else you need or want to read you can get a lot of reading done that way.