How to Survive in a World of Information Overload

Mastering information consumption starts with determining your values, then turning your values into time.

Values are attributes of the person we want to be.

Values such as honesty, integrity, self-reliance, and kindness are traits you want to embody rather than something you want to have, like money or social status. If it can be taken away from you, it’s not a value.

A value is like a guiding star; it’s the fixed point we use to help us navigate our life choices, including how we spend our time.

By categorizing our values into three life domains—you, your relationships, and your work—we get two things: an outline of where we spend our time, and a way to think about how we plan our days.

After we come up with our most important values, we must build those values into our calendars. If we don’t plan time to live out our values—e.g., making time to spend with our friends to live out our value of loyalty—we won’t follow through.

Most people consume information in whatever cracks of time they have in their day, or when they feel bored, lonely, or overwhelmed. Those negative feelings, or internal triggers, are the leading cause of distraction.

• Schedule imposes a constraint. People who rely on long to-do lists most often don’t accomplish what they say they’re going to do.
• You can always add more to a to-do list. A calendar, on the other hand, forces you to make trade-offs.
• We all only have 24 hours in a day, so we have to make decisions about how we want to spend our time.

After deciding your values, turning them into time, and imposing constraints based on your schedule, you should have a much shorter queue of content that’s worth your attention.

But there’s still one more trick to getting the most of your time: multitasking!

By first turning our values into time, filtering out the superfluous sources of information we don’t have time for, and finding ways to get more out of the time we have by using multi-channel multitasking, we can consume important information without letting it consume us.