Peter Bregman has a great post at Harvard Business Review about managing the flood of information we see every day. In it he sets up the problem of so much information available and the possible solution. The short answer is focus. However focus requires that we define not only what we will focus on but also on the things we choose to ignore. Face it, none of us has enough time in the day to read and react to everything. Here are a couple of good quotes
So we try to speed up to match the pace of the action around us. We stay up until 3 am trying to answer all our emails. We twitter, we facebook, and we link-in. We scan news websites wanting to make sure we stay up to date on the latest updates. And we salivate each time we hear the beep or vibration of a new text message.
But that’s a mistake. The speed with which information hurtles towards us is unavoidable (and it’s getting worse). But trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate.
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After the CEO busted me in the elevator, he told me about the meeting he had just come from. It was a gathering of all the finalists, of which he was one, for the title of Entrepreneur of the Year. This was an important meeting for him — as it was for everyone who aspired to the title (the judges were all in attendance) — and before he entered he had made two explicit decisions: 1. To focus on the meeting itself and 2. Not to check his BlackBerry.
What amazed him was that he was the only one not glued to a mobile device. Were all the other CEOs not interested in the title? Were their businesses so dependent on them that they couldn’t be away for one hour? Is either of those a smart thing to communicate to the judges?
The entire post is well worth reading.
Interesting to see how a group of CEOs will behave the same way that a group of non-executive employees will with their pile of smartphones/laptops/tablets in a meeting. I’m not sure if it’s saying the meeting wasn’t important to them (in which case, why show up?), or if they really thought they were all that important for that hour.
I think it’s important to treat the “information tsunami” in two groups – information volume/sources you can control, and those you can’t. For me, I have a great deal of control over what I see in my personal email account, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But I have very little control over when and how often my colleagues, clients, and partners contact me, most of which is via email. THAT is by far my biggest challenge when it comes to managing that flow efficiently.