Michael Slater – cofounder of BuildingWebApps.com – asked one of those questions I find keep popping up in my life: How to do you cope with the information flood? The techniques I used back last century fail utterly in a world of blogs, social networks, intermittent twitter service, iPhones and RSS. I’ve had to find new ways, then find new, new ways.

Here’s a secret about me: I’m a history addict. I have this crazy idea that there were people in the world before Microsoft, Apple and Google, and by learning how these people prospered, struggled, lived, died, toiled, schemed, built and dreamed we lucky folks today can pick up an idea or two.

For instance, there was this other guy from Illinois:

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disentrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

We – especially those of us who are developers, microISVs and startups – live in a world where the old dogmas of dealing with information – find it, store it, keep it – drown like rats trying to swim across the Mississippi of information that we are compelled to deal with each and every day. You. Can’t. Keep. Up.

I wish I had a stainless steel and glossy black plastic airtight comprehensive answer for you, and for me. All I’ve got is what seems to be working for me now:

Email. Will the last non-spammer please turn out the lights? Given that < 1% of the email I get actually matters 2 to 3 times a day I start a timer, open email, reply to any genuinely time sensitive messages, grab any messages that I will to respond to and stick them into my Today, Tomorrow or This Week Folder and file or kill the rest. I keep a running estimate on my Today folder – each item times 5 minutes – and resize my Respond to Email todo at the end of the day accordingly.

Want to double your productivity? Just do one simple thing: spend the first 3 to 4 hours of each workday working before you check email for the first time.

Tech Support. My first microISV app – MasterList Professional – still gets a few sales although from a technical point of view it’s obsolete (VB6/Access). But it works, my customers are happy and it still sells, so that means it still needs tech support. Given the number of fine online tech support systems out there – FogBugz and HelpSpot to name two – you want to use an online system to manage this information feed into your life. I use FogBugz for free (and you can too) – because its Bayesian filtering catches most spam, it’s simple and fast. Given this plugin for Rails, it will be a snap to feed all Project X tech support issues into it in the very near future.

RSS. It used to be that I thought Google Reader was the height of RSS productivity: wrong. It’s a great reader, but all it is is a higher dike to keep the RSS waters at bay. A few few months back I added one too many feeds and flooded out with too many things to read even in my filtered folder of most important feeds to follow.

Here’s how to really make GReader useful: add aideRSS‘s Firefox extension to your copy of FF. It realtime ranks the posts in your GReader (or other RSS readers or feeds) for their quality – a value aideRSS calls PostRank – and let’s you filter to good, great or best. For example, there are 324 posts in my folder of RSS feeds I most care about. Too many. With aideRSS installed, that goes down to 17. Nice! (thanks for the suggestion Marshall!)

Your tech world. It’s the air we breathe and the water we swim in: if you’re going to be a successful microISV you have to be a successful developer, and that means keeping up with everything that is changing in the languages/frameworks you use. This is a subject worth a few posts in and by itself, but for now let me whisper two words in your ear: Alltop and TechJunk.

At Alltop you’ll find a growing list of topics like Macintosh, Windows, Ruby, Programming and more that lead to the most popular/most respected blogs/web sites, each showing their 5 most recent posts. The beauty of these pages is you can scan a great deal of info quickly, tasting interesting posts by mouseovering them and clicking the best of the lot to actually read. Why use Alltop when there’s GReader? Because by seeing in a glance that 5 of the blogs you follow are talking about X right now is a super simple way to get your attention for things that rise above the background noise level.

TechJunk is YADWI – yet another Dave Winer Invention – like its sibling, NewsJunk, it’s a site/feed of the most interesting stuff to people who can’t get enough of this in the first place. Like AllTop and aideRSS, it’s all about using other people’s attention so you don’t have to use yours.

The point of this post isn’t so much that aideRSS, FogBugz et.al. are great tools (they are), or that email is dead and dying (it is); it’s that if you are going to cope with a world where information overload is a fact of life, every so often you need to stop, reassess how you control the torrent, and up your game.