Inspiration Overload

In my last post, I told you about some of the blogs that I've been reading lately. I think going back to my Flickr favorites to put together that post gave me a little kick of inspiration over the weekend. The central design for the papercut above just came to me out of the blue, and I had to sketch it up right away. I spent some idle time hanging out in the yard with the kids (with papercut sketch in hand), and our crabapple tree caught my eye, so that had to be incorporated as well.

This kind of quick flash of papercutting inspiration and equally quick turnaround time for completing the project rarely happens for me, so it was a milestone of sorts.

However, now I'm feeling inspiration overload, which seems to be the craft/design/art blog reader's variation of workplace "information overload." Electronic information overload--from emailing, texting, surfing, etc.--has become so prevalent that there is even a formal organization devoted to combating its drag on workplace productivity. Nathan Zeldes, the founder of the Information Overload Research Group, defines the problem this way:

I define Information Overload, or Infomania as it is informally called at times, as the problem that today’s Information Intensity - the ubiquitous, rapid flow and exchange of information, communications, and the implicit tasks they impose - puts our knowledge workers and managers in a chronic state of anxiety that is exacting a heavy toll on their productivity as employees as well as on their personal well-being. This problem is caused primarily by the combination of two distinct phenomena: one is Queued incoming message overload, and the other is Distractions/interruptions.

The term "Infomania" pretty much sums up the downside to blogging and surfing. Because information/inspiration is everywhere, and so easily and quickly accessible, it sometimes gives me that not-good manic feeling that leads to a creative dead end. Sometimes there seems to be TOO much eye candy, inspiration, and free patterns available. It's all wonderful to see, but it gets to the point where the list of projects I want to try becomes too much of a burden.

I think some of you out there may have experienced this: you read a blog, click on an interesting link, and then find yourself, several blogs and hours later, completely unsure about how you got there and what you wanted to find out in the first place. (Smoothpebble, I know you have a funny term for this, but web surfing seems to have affected my long-term memory as well.)

So, my question is, how do you strike a balance between having a "real" life and drawing on inspiration from the Web?