The Secret to Handling Information Overload
by Dr. Joe Vitale
www.mrfire.com
A friend of mine complained that there is just too much
information on the Internet. He said, "I feel like I'm
standing in the middle of the biggest library on earth. I
don't know what to read first!"
He's not alone. The other day I received an email from a
woman who complained that there are too many e-books
available on how to do things. "I can't read them all, and I
can't weed out the junk to find the good stuff. Help!"
And speaking of email, one of my peers says he gets 300
messages each day. He spends hours every day quickly
reviewing and instantly answering, or deleting, hundreds of
messages. "I'm overwhelmed!" he told me.
Yes, we live in the information age.
But is that a good thing?
>From time to time someone will write and ask me how *I*
manage to handle the information overload that drowns most
of us. I thought about it for a while and think I know the
answer:
I set intentions.
In other words, I set goals, outcomes, or intentions for
what I want. As a result of that clearly defined end result,
a naturally occurring pruning process takes place:
Everything that is relevant to my goal sticks; Everything
that is unimportant to it drops away.
For example, when I was writing my latest e-book, "Hypnotic
Marketing," I was consciously as well as unconsciously on
the alert for anything and everything that pertained to the
three-step marketing formula I describe in the book:
Direct-Response Publicity, Hypnotic Websites, and Hypnotic
Writing. Anything else rarely got my attention.
Each day when I checked my email box and saw several hundred
messages, I was able to move through them quickly by asking
myself, "Does this pertain to my writing Hypnotic
Marketing?" If it did, I read it. If it didn't, I pushed it
aside or deleted it.
The same thing happened when people would send me e-books
for my review, or when I would get offers to buy more
e-books. I love e-books. I think they are the wave of the
future. But during the time I was researching and writing
Hypnotic Marketing, unless the e-book somehow related to
that project, I put it aside. If it's not part of my
intention, I don't want to waste time looking at it. Period.
And that exact same process helps me get through all the
information available on the Net. While there may be
millions of websites online, maybe only a handful of them
are of interest to me when I'm focused on writing Hypnotic
Marketing. Those handful are all I want to know about, at
least for now.
So there's the key to handling information overload: Set an
intention. A goal. A clear outcome. An end-result. And let
it be your guiding light through the maze of information
flooding your mind and fighting for your attention.
By knowing what you want, you create a natural filtering
process that eliminates virtually everything not related to
achieving your intention.
To be honest, you may still be distracted from time to time.
That's human nature. Forgive yourself, enjoy yourself, and
get back on track. The more you can stick with your goals,
the more you can survive the blessing and the curse of the
Internet: Information Overload.
Copyright © 2005 by Joe Vitale. All rights reserved.
You may forward this in its entirety to anyone you wish.
Hypnotic Marketing Inc.
121 Canyon Gap Rd
Wimberley TX 78676
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