Dealing With Information Overload

The information age is well and truly upon us and we are bombarded with all sort of information from different sources- push emails, RSS feeds, Facebook updates just to name a few. The advent of internet has a huge impact on our lives. It changed for ever what we can call the 4Cs- culture, commerce, connection, and communication. Our desire to know coupled with the desire to be part of every excitement out there has led us to situation where we place ourselves in the way of an information storm. We also understand the power of information. If we only know how, every word of information is an asset as there are avenues of monetization. This creates in us an unpleasant condition which is referred to as information overload. We see many of the information workers struggling to deal with information overload. So is there a way to manage the amount of information we should allow in our life. Let's examine some of the options we have.

To begin with, we must have a clear priority based on well-defined goals. This should allow us to focus on our most important tasks at our hand which, in turn will help us the to work with only the essentials. As a rule we can follow a four step process, which we can call as the rule of 4Es- Evaluate, Execute, Eliminate and Escape. The first step is Evaluation, which means we first have to identify what information from all the ones that we have gathered from relevant sources is required for achieving our most important and immediate goals. One more criterion to keep in mind while zeroing on the information is to ascertain which of the information can easily be acted upon. Having evaluated the information, we should quickly move on to using the information for whatever you have needed it for in the first place. This constitutes the Execute step.

Next is the Elimination step. In this step, we eliminate all the extraneous information from unnecessarily occupying our precious hard disk space. We can let go of any information source that is not helping in our objective. If you have performed the three steps mentioned so far you should already be feeling lighter. Whatever still remains can be dealt with in the last step- Escape. It means we should remove ourselves from the source of all information for a short period. Try selective unplugging.

Even better, you may try to plug out totally for some time and escape to an uninhabited island!

Source: http://jitendratiwari.com/