The Elegant Strategy To Overcome “Information Overload” (And How To Do It Almost Overnight)

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How do you overcome “Information Overload”? Is there a way out of the craziness of constant information availability?

We all struggle with information. We're almost always behind, constantly making notes, trying to catch up.

Should we cut back on information completely? Is that the solution? Or is there a simpler, more elegant way to relax and take in endless amounts of information?

Let's find out how to handle information overload almost overnight.
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)

Since last Friday I've been doing something quite unusual.

I've been standing in front of the mirror when I'm brushing my teeth. You'd say, well, that's not so unusual, is it. But I'm not standing on both legs, but on a single leg at a time. Now, why would I do that?

The reason why I started to do this weird activity is because I watched a video about balance. It said that people start losing their balance around the age of 30 that took me by surprise. I always assumed that much older people lost their balance over time and then needed some kind of walker or walking stick to stay upright.

It's fair enough to say that as you age, you know, I'm going to have as many balanced problems as most older people do. You've just got some information.

Is it just information or is it an overload? How do we use information? Why does it cause so much of an overload? Why is it that we can never keep up with it? One of the primary reasons is because we're always trying to implement. We're always trying to stand on one leg.

In today's episode, we're going to look at three buckets of information.

And I promise you, if you follow this advice, the information overload won't disappear tomorrow, but by next week or the next month, you will feel completely at peace with all kinds of information. Let's start out with a three buckets of information.

And it's not like I'm telling you something that you don't know about, but hear me out. The first bucket of information is knowledge. The second is entertainment and the third is implementation.

Just knowing about these three things isn't going to help you, but how you put the information in the separate buckets, that's really going to change the way you look at almost any information.

Let's start out with the first one, which is knowledge.

I was listening to an interview where singer Song Rai of Paul McCartney was talking about how they came about the song “Oblady Oblada”. The Beatles were in “Rishikash India”, doing meditation with Maharishi.

Then after meditation, they used to go to the clubs, they did not drink dance, food. And it was on one of those nights in one of those clubs that Paul McCartney ran into this African guy.

And as they were talking and dancing, this guy went off and say, “Oh, bloody, he obla de la de la la.” “Fcazón bra.” And McCartney thought, “This is a really good theme for a song.” So he started to write the lyrics as well as the music.

But that's when they got stuck.

The three of them, George Paul and Ringo sat down and tried to create that opening sound. And they just couldn't get it going. And then John Lennon shows up. As because, me tells the story, we were not getting anywhere with it.

Kaching, Kaching, Kaching, nothing was happening. In Johnland in Waukson and says, “Hey guys, what's up.” And they tell him about Oblady Oblada. And he goes, “Oh, that one.”

He sits down on the piano and he turns out that opening piece that goes, “Dentantantantantant.” And of course, they all fall back and go, “Yes.” Now that was a lovely story, wasn't it.

But notice how you automatically allocated it to a bucket.

You didn't go, oh wait, I have to make notes. I have to write the down. You'll listen to it and then you put it somewhere. In your memory, but you didn't want to do anything with it.

It's the same kind of thing that you do with the weather report. You might sit through an entire weather report and go, “That's cool.” And do nothing with it. Because nothing is happening. It's not 40 degrees centigrade out there.

It's not boiling hot. Or it's not freezing cold. Or there's no thunderstorm on the horizon. So there's nothing to implement. So you just put it down as a fact, as something that you know.

And when you read a book, and it has all of this information.

Chapter one, chapter 6, chapter 17, and you're thinking, I have to make notes. No, you don't have to make notes. You might want to make notes as a hobby or because this slows you down in your savoring the book, your savoring the information, but in general, you don't have to remember all of those things.

Remembering is all part of what we did at school. As little kids, it was drilled into us that we had to go to school, we had to memorize everything and then we had to spit it out in some examination.

And that's why we're always trying to remember things. At one point I used to make copious notes of everything, but now when I'm reading a book, it's just knowledge. I'm not going to do anything with it. If you're not going to do anything with it, you really don't care.

We get all kinds of information of this nature and probably goes through thousands of pieces of data in every single month.

Knowledge is just keeping your rest of what's happening, things that you're doing right, possibly things you're doing wrong, you don't have to do anything with it, you just have to know that it's there, and that's the first bucket, and you already knew that.

Most of the information that you and I have, we put in the bucket automatically. It's only when it pertains to our business that we think oh we somehow have to retain this information and we don't. So that's the first step. Just put everything into the knowledge bucket.

We then have the second bucket namely entertainment.

I don't have to tell you what to do with this. You watch Netflix, that's entertainment, you don't make any notes. You watch comedy on YouTube, that's entertainment, you read a novel, you hear a joke, that's all entertainment.

You don't feel the need to file away everything these three ring binders or in some massive cloud backups somewhere. You laugh, you entertain yourself, and you move on, and that's the simplest bucket of all the entertainment bucket.

So now we have two buckets, the knowledge bucket and the entertainment bucket. You know what's coming next, right. You do.

It's the implementation bucket.

And this is the reason why I stand on one foot while brushing my teeth. In fact, as I'm recording this podcast, I'm still standing on one foot. The video suggested that I put on my socks while standing on one foot.

And while it's not a very complex activity, it's something that I could implement. If you were to treat all the information that you got in a day, a week or a month, it could be like a pizza and you'd have slices.

And if you watch endless comedy like I do on YouTube, then one huge slice goes to entertainment. And since you're listening to this podcast, you're probably reading books, listening to what your books, which means you're getting a lot of information that you need for your life and your business.

And you feel somehow that you have to sit down and you have to write it all down or somehow back it up. And you don't have to do that.

Let me give you an example.

About 10 years ago, I read a book which talked about onboarding. Onboarding is when someone joins your organization, and usually what happens is that they're given a desk, they're given a big folder, and they have to go through the information.

And you would think that the opposite would happen. They would be given a warm welcome. They would be shown around the place in great detail. They would be made comfortable. That hold zone that they're entering would have been made into a safe zone.

But that's not what happens in most places.

That's not what happens on membership sites. And we have a membership site at 5,000 BC. And as I read through this first chapter of the book, I had no idea what I was getting into. I got to page 15 or maybe page 20.

And I realized I have to backtrack. I have to make notes. I found myself on page one and I started to write down all of these details. But it wasn't just a bunch of details, rather it was an implementation plan.

And guess what? It took us another six months before we could put in all of those emails, all of those steps so that when someone joined 5,000 BC when they joined that membership site, they would feel comfortable.

They would feel welcome.

They would know what to do. They would have tiny little steps that they could take and then not just join another membership site, but be part of the community and in turn the community would rally around to help them settle that took a lot of time.

Everything that you're making notes of is going to take you ages to implement. The problem is when you start reading or listening to something, you don't know what you're getting into. For instance, clients will buy a home study of the article writing course or the information products course.

And almost instantly they will start making notes. And my advice to them is to treat it like knowledge, to go from one end to the other. In fact, to go from one end to the other at extremely high speed, so that you get to the end.

The end is very important because it gives you that satisfaction of having completed something.

And while you're zooming through that information, you can make little bookmarks. And those bookmarks will tell you where to go back, those are the markers where your implementation is going to begin.

In the article writing course for instance, if you made some kind of bookmark at objections, you could probably implement that in a day, two days. If on the other hand you wanted to learn how to write the opening paragraph of an article, that might take you several weeks.

Each piece of implementation is not exactly the same.

Some pieces might take you weeks, months, or if you just have to stand in your foot or put on your socks while standing on one foot, well, that just takes a few minutes. And despite the fact that I'm telling you not to make notes, sometimes it can just be a very fun activity.

I will take my iPad and go to the cafe or I'll take a diary and I have my fountain pen and I'm listening to something. Maybe it's Michael Lewis talking about storytelling. I'm already very comfortable with storytelling but I like what he's saying and I make little sketches.

I'll write down little anecdotes and it's a fun way. It's almost entertainment. It's when you have to remember everything or feel that you have to remember everything that it becomes overwhelming.

You and I, we never gonna catch up with all the information that's out there. In fact, if we go back to when your grandparents lived and if they stepped into a library, there was way more information than they could cope with going back 70, 80 years ago.

There's absolutely no point in continuing to say this information is overwhelming.

All you have to do is implement. How do you implement?

One of the three buckets.

Is it knowledge?

Is it entertainment?

Or is it implementation?

The first two buckets are really easy. The last one. Well, it's only a very small slice of that pizza. Probably 5% or even 2%. Make sure that you do implement that small amount and you will see that things start to move at a very steady pace as you go through your life and your business.

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