Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love

Chapter 40. Thin Slicing through the Information Overload Jungle

I recently asked my list what problems they wanted help with, and the problem that ranked #1 is "How do I deal with information overload?"

One reader claimed to have downloaded over a million pages of free information during the holidays. Nobody is going to read a million pages of anything. Not in this lifetime.

I can give you some strategies that will help you cut through the fog and focus on what you need to focus on. Let's reframe the problem so we can get a handle on it.

We need to decide what's important and what isn't. Then we need to focus on what's important and let the unimportant stuff go. You have to be firm about this. Either something is relevant or it isn't. You know immediately. If it's not relevant, delete it.

That doesn't mean that reading for fun is a bad thing. I occasionally curl up with a glass of Shiraz and a Kinky Friedman or O. Henry book. From reading Kinky, it's obvious that he curls up with O. Henry, too. I love to watch Nero Wolfe solve mysteries. I've reread the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all the sequels, until I can recite pages of the stuff from memory, and I look forward to reading it again. Maybe it's the Shiraz, but I find something new and hilarious every time I reread Douglas Adams.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the hundreds of e-mails, e-books, and offers that land in your mailbox every week. I'm talking about the conflicting information you get on important ...