15 months ago, I signed up for the Mark Hendricks’ 12 Days of Christmas giveaway. I signed up for dozens of newsletters, downloaded scores of ebooks and videos, and generally got tired of typing my email address.

Now, 15 months later, I still have a folder full of ebooks to peruse, and an email folder with messages I want to save, or haven’t even read yet! And while some of these items are on topics that I want to dive into someday, many are related to things I’ve already spent a lot of time researching and learning about.

So why do I hold onto this information? And why do I continue to accumulate more such information, and keep adding it to my pile? Because I think, however irrationally, that there might be some nugget of knowledge buried in there, somewhere, that I vitally need to know.

Rrrrrriiiiight. Who am I kidding? My rational brain tells me that it’s not worth the time to dig that bit of knowledge out of there, if it even exists. That I don’t need perfect knowledge, anyway, to make decisions and take actions. And on the days that I convince myself that this is true, I go on a clean-out-the-closets rampage, and start deleting left and right. And for a while afterward, I actually feel better.

I call this my information binge and purge. <No offense to those who are, or who know someone who is, suffering from this real, often deadly, disorder.> And I’m trying to get better — I’m learning to ask myself, before I sign up/download, if I really need this new bit of information.

Does this sound like you? Anyone want to share their tips for stopping information overload before it starts??

Tags: [informationoverload], [business], [internet]

Last 5 posts by Terri Zwierzynski

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Education/Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.