coned88, I am pretty surprised with you situation. You have done a marvelous job on self diagnosing the trouble, but you don’t see the solution. In most cases understanding and describing the problem is by far the hardest part. So you are 90% ready to solve the issue.

Disclaimer: you are a smart person, so I will use a couple of thinking shortcuts. Just so you know. You don’t want to read a book, don’t you? (:
First of all, lets handle this:
> One of which is directed to what I am actively doing and one below it which seems to process information in a never ending manner.

# Thought flies

„Buzzing” in your head, right? Those thoughts are like flies. They fly around, sometimes they sit quietly, sometimes they come back and sabotage everything. You can’t rest properly, you can’t work. It hurts us because of context and task switching costs.

This drains your „brain mana” and we have roughly 3-4 hours of highly productive brain activity per day. And there is only way to stop this leak: kill those flies. The best way to handle this is by dumping everything on paper. Even better, on a single page. A3, anyone? Reading books, articles, tasks, meetings with friends, everything. Directed graphs (a form of a mind map) IMO works best.

And when you finish it, stuff suddenly becomes manageable. This will help you to get rid of the big issues. Small ones hurt also.

To get rid of the small ones, you have to have a Single Point of Truth. A place where you store stuff. Your head is not the right place for it. If you are doing some work or enjoying a movie and suddenly a fly-thought comes and distracts you from working or resting, just write it and forget about it.

# IRL techniques

There are some tools/techniques I use to handle 90% of thoughts, issues:

Home related tasks: Wunderlist. Tax documents, shopping lists goes there. If it is not there it doesn’t exit.

Work related tasks: Asana. If it is not there, it just doesn't exit. Simple as that.

Online articles: There 2 types. Might be useful later or must read it now. If I just want to store I use Evernote page save or Instapaper and archive. If I want to read it I simply read it or send to Instapaper. Then I just read them in bulk on Kindle.

Email: I use Gmail and Mailbox. First of all Gmail. I really use „Archive” a lot. If I have read what I have or replied I hit „Archive” and forget about it. With Mailbox it is even better. If I want to postpone messages I simply snooze them a day or week. Often, they get outdated quickly and then I just archive them. Empty mailbox —> empty head. I never a have a thought fly about email. I know that everything I need will be there when I open or want to open it.

For any thought fly there is a compartment. Sometimes you just put it on hold and place it on your corkboard and sometimes you just dump it into a giant, searchable archive.

So in a nutshell, you just have to clean your head and move stuff to another storage vehicle. Even the best mind memory is nothing compared to a pen and paper.

# Filtering

The second thing you should think about is filtering. I would recommend reading a small article about Theory of constraints or you can go wild and read (it is a one evening book) The Goal by M. Goldratt. Shrinking a whole book into your case: you can’t have more incoming stuff (articles, ideas) than you process. Otherwise, you will have a huge traffic jam in your head. And adding more items is the worst thing you can do.

So you can just cut off the supply of new and just process the old stuff. Or just get rid of that. We are all information hoarders. But there is a secret: a world will not break if we just purge some stuff. Less is more.

Good Luck!