What To Do About Information Overload
The amount of information coming across your screen every day probably makes your head spin. It can be overwhelming just to decide which emails need your attention and which do not. And then, with all of that information in front of you, it can feel impossible to focus and get any actual work done.
Successfully handling the challenge of information complexity is one thing that sets great leaders apart. Are you able to maintain your ability to focus and think amidst information overload? There are many tactics for this. I'm just giving you three.
CLOSE OR PIN YOUR TABS
This sounds simplistic, but managing your screen clutter is a habit that will directly affect your efficiency and effectiveness. If you leave your browser tabs with unfinished business open for later, then it detracts from your focus on doing well now. There's this feeling that we don't want to let go of these loose ends for fear they'll get lost. If there's something you really will forget or lose if you close the tab, something that for whatever reason is not going to make it on your to-do list, try pinning it. The point is to simplify what you're looking at in order to lower the "peripheral noise level."
ITERATE BETWEEN THE FOREST AND THE TREES
You bury into the details. Then you come up for air and look at the big picture. Then, you have more strategic insight with which to vet and flesh out details again. Those details are then checked against the big-picture objectives. This vacillation between detail and big-picture thinking enables cross-checking so that the best solutions can emerge.
BUCKET AND SIMPLIFY TO THE POINT THAT YOU CAN "WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND" IT ALL
This may be part of your process in taking the forest-level view. Grab a pen and paper and do a brain dump of all your "buckets." If you have a ton of minutiae to get off your mind, perhaps a to-do list that can live somewhere, like Trello, is a better way to start. The point is to get yourself to a place of being able to hold in working memory the themes, or buckets, of what is on your plate right now, and to know where to go to find everything else.
Having the ability to hold all of our various balls in the air can go a long way to addressing the overwhelm and information overload that thwarts our sense of calm and ability to focus. We don't need to be in touch with the detail inside each bucket, we just need to know where to access that detail and trust that we will when the time is right.
