Episode #84: How To Master The Daily Info Tsunami

The pace is unrelenting. The world is producing information at a prodigious rate and somehow we are supposed to keep up with it all. In today's show we will explore some ideas on how we can better deal with this daily overpowering tidal wave of stuff.

Toyota Motor corp will supply its fuel cell vehicle technology to major Chinese automaker Beijing Automotive Group as it seeks to expand business in the world’s largest auto market by volume. This is the first tie up between Toyota and a Chinese automaker for hydrogen powered vehicles. Toyota is allowing royalty free access to nearly twenty four thousand patents for electrified vehicles. In other news, the English language ability of students at public secondary schools missed the government’s proficiency target in two thousand and eighteen. Final year students of both junior and senior high schools did not reach the fifty percent goal for achieving the required levels for the Eiken proficiency test. The average result was only forty two point six percent for junior high students and forty point two percent for High school students hit the targets. Finally, the Keidanren, the nations most powerful business lobby has approved year round hiring of new graduates. Restrictions have been lifted to enable firms to hire workers with greater flexibility based on their needs while allowing the students more freedom in their job hunting process.

Paper piled high on all flat surfaces, email in-boxes bursting at the seams, project and completion deadlines menacing your normal calm equilibrium. Days fly by punctuated by too many meetings, the quality of which are usually abysmal, and the entertainment factor zero.

Keeping up to date with your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Line, Instagram, Pintrest accounts saps your mind and body. The black, oily tsunami of “stuff” just keeps coming, no matter what you do. Life is short and is this all there is to look forward to – years and years of this regimen? How do you grow when you are constantly being pushed backward, fighting for survival, swimming against a roiling sea of “stuff”?

“While the music is playing you have to keep dancing”. Uh oh! Is that really the case? Can we keep dancing or will we suffer a major intervention that wrecks everything, because we can’t find a way out of this impending doom and gloom of overwhelm.

Here are some ideas on how to create interrupt in your life and master the daily turmoil:

Take stock of the issues and create some clarity about the field of battle confronting you. List up the offending items that are overwhelming you, “speak their name” to make them visible and less daunting. Dig further for each item as to why it is a constant irritant.

For example, “I pile up paper as a way of not losing it, but I don’t get back to dealing with it”. “E-mail has become untenable, there is so much excess flow, I can’t keep up and things begin to drift”. "I have all of these projects noisily buzzing around, at various points of completion, and they are like a dark cloud of impending doom that hovers over me”. “Meetings suck the life force out of me by devouring my precious time and energy, compounding my woes and squeezing the little non-meeting time available to me”. “Business social media is a modern day digital opiate, spreading fast and wide, debilitating all who come into contact with it”.

We cannot do everything, but we can do the most important thing, so start by deciding which nightmare is the highest priority. Create “block times” in your schedule, which are appointments with yourself and recorded in your diary. For that period of protected time attack the offending item with gusto, starting by deleting all the backlog of “stuff” whose use by date has passed. Get the survivors into a priority order for further attack.

If it is paper, ruthlessly throw it out and file the rest into one file, arranged inside into priority order for the next assault. Before you file anything permanently, ask yourself, “how often in the last year did I consult any of the items I have already so meticulously filed?”. Scariest question in captivity!

If it is email, select alphabetic filtering, so you dismiss masses of emails at one go. With the remainder, move items into new folders called Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3. If it doesn’t make it into one of these three folders then unceremoniously delete it. If you are a notorious hoarder (like me), and simply cannot bring yourself to press the delete button, then put it in a new folder called “Just In Case”.

Only after that process has been completed, you may roll over and give up! Hey, if there is some sticky item that is still that important, the other party will remind you with their follow up, so relax.

For projects, stop the bees buzzing in your head, by writing down all these nebulous items on a long list and then attach priorities to them. Start working on the main priority projects first. Just by plucking them out of the ether and writing them down, we realize the awful truth – we have too many things on the go and this is ridiculous. We can now attach more realistic timeframes for completion and maybe even drop some.

Meetings are trickier, because often we have little in the way of choice and few options. Be positive, consider your compulsory attendance at excruciatingly painful meetings as character building – “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.

If you must attend, try to bring some better order to the way meetings are run. Try to have the agenda sent out beforehand, get everyone to agree to start on time regardless of who is not in the room, elect an Attila The Hun style facilitator to run the meeting to better control the ebb and flow of discussion. Finish on time!

Don’t set meetings in one hour blocks – say make it 40 minutes instead, and get through it all in that time or hold content over to the next meeting. If you have truckloads of meetings and you can pick up just 20 minutes a day from every meeting, then life starts to look a lot, lot better!

For business social media, face the fact that you have become a heinous glutton, and have seriously over indulged. Be positively violent toward non-essentials. Axe them without mercy or at the least, banish them from your purview. Make some choices about where the highest value lies and spend your downtime there.

Keep in mind that there is not that much coming through the digital fire hose that is really vital, as opposed to mildly interesting. If you really need information on a particular subject, rather than random grazing on the high plains, you can use the search function to aggregate what is out there. Think high art curation, rather than mass consumption.

Truncate the deluge, sort, prioritise and curate. Get clarity first then allocate the time to wade into battle, swinging your long sword, smiting the enemy left and right, until the battlefield is yours again. Be absolutely ruthless about wasting your time on low level “stuff”. Now go get um!

Action Steps

1. Stop, look, consider
2. List up the items
3. Look for the root cause behind the issue
4. Create block time
5. Concentrate on the priority items only
6. Be ruthless - cut, cut, cut