Overcoming Information Overload: Strategies for Clarity

We’re flooded with more information than ever promising to make us smarter, healthier, and happier. We consume more books, podcasts, articles, and videos than we could possibly absorb.

We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do. Anything you might want to accomplish-executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business— requires finding and putting to use the right information. Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.

According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 giga-bytes.’ A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.

Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaus-tion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention. Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files?

And a report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems. Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time are they able to find the information required to do their jobs.

In other words, we go to work five days per week, but spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work. Half the time, we don’t even succeed in doing that.

For insight into our own time, we can look to history for lessons on what worked in other eras. The practice of writing down one’s thoughts and notes to help make sense of the world has a long legacy. For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”

Popularized in a previous period of information overload, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-ries, the commonplace book was more than a diary or journal of personal reflections. It was a learning tool that the educated class used to understand a rapidly changing world and their place in it.

Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world. They drew on their notebooks in conversation and used them to connect bits of knowledge from different sources and to inspire their own thinking.

As a society, all of us could benefit from the modern equivalent of a commonplace book. The media landscape of today is oriented toward what is novel and public-the latest political controversy, the new celebrity scandal, or the viral meme of the day. Resurrecting the commonplace book allows us to stem the tide, shifting our relationship with information toward the timeless and the private.

Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. Not only could this lead to more civil discussions about the important topics of the day; it could also preserve our mental health and heal our splintered attention.

In past centuries, only the intellectual elite needed commonplace books-writers, politicians, philosophers, and scientists who had a reason to synthesize their writing or research.

Nowadays, almost everyone needs a way to manage information.

More than half the workforce today can be considered “knowl-edge workers”-professionals for whom knowledge is their most valuable asset, and who spend a majority of their time managing large amounts of information. In addition, no matter what our formal role is, all of us have to come up with new ideas, solve novel problems, and communicate with others effectively. We have to do these things regularly, reliably, not just once in a while.

As a knowledge worker, where does your knowledge live? Where does your knowledge go when it’s created or discovered? “Knowledge” can seem like a lofty concept reserved exclusively for scholars and academics, but at the most practical level, knowledge begins with the simple, time-honored practice of taking notes.

For many people, their understanding of notetaking was formed in school. You were probably first told to write something down because it would be on the test. This implied that the minute the test was over, you would never reference those notes again. Learning was treated as essentially disposable, with no intention of that knowledge being useful for the long term.

When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need.

In the professional world:

I’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on.
No one tells you when or how your notes will be used.
The “test” can come at any time and in any form.
You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place.
You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.

This isn’t the same notetaking you learned in school. I’s time to elevate the status of notes from test prep and humble scribblings into something far more interesting and dynamic. For modern, professional notetaking a note is a “knowledge building block” a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

By this definition, a note could include a passage from a book or article that you were inspired by; a photo or image from the web with your annotations; or a bullet-point list of your meandering thoughts on a topic, among many other examples. A note could include a single quote from a film that really struck you, all the way to thousands of words you saved from an in-depth book. The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.

Source : Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59616977-building-a-second-brain