How to cope with Information overload
Sometimes in your business life you may find that you’re overwhelmed with information, particularly if your job requires that you keep up with news and trends in your industry.
I’m not talking about feeling overwhelmed with the amount of tasks you may have to complete in a given cycle – that’s a time management issue. I’m referring purely to adding learning curves to your workload.
One such industry is Internet Marketing and generally any type of hands-on selling online, where one-man companies are run by a stressed MD who’s half way through learning how to write better copy for his sales pages, how to implement the newest shopping cart into their website and how to get he widget that allows you to take payments online to work properly.
And then there’s the pile of highly recommended books that will make you a better salesperson, a better time manager, a better business man and a wealthy tycoon.
It’s that kind of overwhelm that I’m referring to, otherwise known as information overload.
There are various books and reports dealing with copying with information overload, and the greatest irony is that they all require a chunk of your precious time to absorb, and even more of it to implement.
I’d like to suggest my solution to copying with information overload, and it is simply this:
The only way to stop information overload is to STOP the flow information coming in.
As counter-active as this may sound, the sad truth is that we only have a limited amount of time to learn and implement strategies and models, and whilst we’re busy learning about these strategies, we STOP implementing anything of what we already know.
Even if you work in a way that allows you to learn a little and implement as you go, your output is significantly less than it would otherwise be were you not bogged down with learning.
Education is very important, and learning curves are often essential to making progress both in life and in business.
But cash flow is the most important thing in the business, and you have to stay active on whatever tasks produce cashflow, and learning produces cash flow (if and when it’s implemented) in the future, not in the ‘now’, when you may need it.
It’s a fine line, and learning has to be a part of your work cycle to help you implement better work practices, better work flows and better time management.
But work is important too, and if you’ve hit information overload, that means that you’re spending much more of your time on learning than you are on your money tasks.
The solution? Stop learning for a while and go back to doing. Start implementing what you’ve learned so far, before you start learning the next step in your desired process.
Build up cashflow to give yourself a buffer that will allow you to take a little time off to learn new things you can put to practice in your business, but know when to put the leaning on pause and get back to your business, so that you get time to use the new knowledge instead of losing it or never putting it into practice due to the paralysis that comes with information overload.
Business tip: make sure you put into practice the things you learn before moving on to the next piece of knowledge. Allocate your time evenly so that you’re focused on your money tasks as well as your learning curves, and make sure you don’t get bogged down with learning too many things at once and run the risk of never putting the knowledge into action.
Feel free to buy me a coffee if I helped you in any way ;)
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