How Do You Deal With Information Overload?

When a writer losses focus and becomes unable to write it is called writer's block. When an athlete cannot perform they can lose their careers. But what happens to the business owner who just wants to learn more about running their business but becomes so overwhelmed that their brain begins to shutdown?

What is Information Overload?

The amount of knowledge a person can absorb and still function efficiently is limited. While each person is different with regards to how much knowledge we can absorb each day, the ability to implement all of that knowledge gets in the way. 

Let's take a look at a few examples. 

Anyone out there who either has been through college or has spent any major time training for "above average" careers has encountered the problems of learning everything the bosses or teachers want you to learn. We spend hours studying for a simple subject just to have to spend several more hours doing it all over again the next day. 

Those people teaching the lessons often forget that they too had years to accumulate the amount of knowledge that they are trying to convey to the new student. 

When it comes to being a business owner, it becomes extremely easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of things your must learn to deal with each day. 

The average business owner often works themselves to exhaustion with the number of roles being played out during the course of normal business. then there are all the new things that arise. 

Here are a few things the average small business owner might have to work on during their day (type of business will cause differences):

• Planning the business
• Promoting the business
• Customer relations
• Seeking financing
• Dealing with employees
• Finding employees
• Designing new products
• Working within there business

While this is a small (and hardly all inclusive) list, it should get the point across that the average small business owner is already overwhelmed just actually running the day to day operations of their business. 

This often does not leave any time for them to actively learn new techniques that they might implement that could actually grow their business for them. 

For instance, if you are a small business owner and what to setup a Facebook page, Then you either hire someone or create one yourself. If you have ever done a Facebook page then you know it can be both tedious and time consuming. 

What about setting up a YouTube channel for your business? How about Twitter accounts? Pinterest? Blogging? 

With all of the new methods that are available as of 2018 to market and grow a business how is the average business owner to deal with it all?

Stopping The Information Overload

The key steps are going to be to stop the flow of extraneous information from coming in. That often means a couple of things that can be done. 

• Turn off your Email for a few days. While email marketing is a great tool and all businesses should find a manner to implement it, the sheer number of promotional emails the average users gets is almost excruciating. At recent count my Gmail account hovers around 115,000 emails almost all of which are promotional. Yes, I said 115k emails. I simply cannot read them all, or hell even deleting them all is too mush work. So I sure don't have time to learn what every single one is about.

• Stop looking at shining objects. This phenomenon referred to as "Shiny Object Syndrome", the process by which we constantly move our attention (focus) from one shiny object to the next, can be one of the most detriment issues to a small business. Many small business owners try to save as much money as they can and erroneously spent more in "time costs" to implement these new techniques simply because they have been told they needed them. If you need a Facebook page, have one created for you.

• Only consider things you can implement with 24 hours. The longer something will take for you to implement the greater the chances that you will not likely finish it. The simple fact is that as a business owner you will get torn into different directions on an almost hourly basis. There is always something of greater priority that comes up when you least need it to. Much like the 2 minute rule I mention in this post, but with a little more leeway for your business. If you cannot do it yourself then consider the step below.

• Focus on running the business. This means do what only you can do with regards to your business. Hire or outsource everything else. If you can't afford to hire new staff considering offering an Internship to local high school or college students. This often will be great stepping stones for their resumes, If they do a good job they could even be the go to new employee when business picks up.  Get people who are better at those aspects of your business then yourself. Let the social teenager create a Facebook profile for you. They will likely get it done in a tenth of the time it might take you to learn it.

Time is the great equalizer for all people. Everyone only gets 24 hours a day. If you have too much to do and are still trying to learn new aspects of your business. You can focus on learning or you can focus on doing.