How to handle information overload

It is a socially and culturally pervasive phenomenon for people to wake up feeling they are deficient as time managers, supervisors, or information managers. Yet, everyone feels the same way, because everyone is being hit with more data than anyone can fathom. Today, there are at least 2,000 books published worldwide. At least 700 are published in your profession every week. Thousands of new magazines are launched every year in the United States. All told, more information is generated in a 24-hour period than you could take in for the rest of your life. And as more people go on-line and add information to the Internet, we will rapidly approach a situation in which more information is generated on earth in one hour than you could take in for the rest of your life. What do we do about it?

First, we don't worry about it. Second, we get more selective than ever about what we take in. Third, we decide what information is truly important to us. Where do we want to be in the future? We can't stay on top of everything, but we can determine in advance where we want to be.

The massive overkill of information that we all face is sometimes amusing and sometimes scary. Here's an example. Typical White House press coverage is 1,800 reporters a day. Couldn't 300 or 400 people do the job? The 1,800 we have is massive overkill. The President himself receives 40,000 letters a day. Imagine all those people writing those letters, all those stamps, all that stationery, all the time spent delivering it -- all to the wrong place, because the White House can't handle those letters. There are correlations in industry, also. All of this is information adding to the massive glut of information we can't handle.