On Strategy

“I Want To Be A Dentist…”

I think most of us remember Herbert the elf from the holiday classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”  Herbie wasn’t happy making toys and he wanted to instead become a dentist.  While the end of March may not be the time people are thinking of Christmas cartoons, I’ll admit to feeling a little bit of Herbert right now.

Marketers and consultants are in the Knowledge business.  We get payed to take data, process it into information and, like the alchemist, turning lead into gold, transmute that information into knowledge that our clients can use.

The challenge, of course, is dealing with the huge amount of information out there.  I had a marketing professor who suggested that one should read about 26 periodicals.  During a break I asked him how a person could keep track of 26 different magazines and papers–some of them dailies.  His reply was that he was a speed-reader.

Of course now that social networking (and blogging) are here to stay, the flow of information has increased even more.  Friends and associates will tip me off to the latest LinkedIn group that looks like a must to be a member of, but I already have more information coming in than I can readily process.  And it just keeps increasing.

So what are the solutions to dealing with information overload?  You can spend 27 hours a day at your desk.  You can learn to speed-read, like my professor.  You can also have the discipline to not read every word of every article or online discussion, picking and choosing only those relvant to you.  Years ago I heard a story that Napolean didn’t read his mail for a week or more.  “That way 90% of the problems that ‘require’ my attention have taken care of themselves and I’ve already learned about the other 10% directly.”  (I’m paraphrasing, here.)

Stephen Covey makes a strong case for dividing your work into quadrants:  Urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, not urgent but important, and not urgent or important.  He says we too often find ourselves on the urgent half of the board when we should learn to ignore the unimportant and delegate as much of the urgent important work as possible, freeing time to be proactive.  Of course the trick to this is having the discipline to stay out of the other quadrants–as well as the focus to know what is and isn’t important.

I guess that’s the crux of it, right there.  Discipline and focus as well as the understanding that you can’t be everywhere at once are the keys to dealing with information overload, but all told, there are days when I envy Herbert the elf–or Peter, the protaganist of the ’90s sleeper, Office Space. After years of coping with the rat race of the white collar world and narrowly escaping prison for a bungled scheme, Peter chucks it all to become a construction worker.  And while there’s definitely a lot to know and a lot of skill involved in construction, the rate of information flow into the trade is a lot slower.  And at the end of the week you can look at a house you built instead of a full inbox.

Tune in next week, when I’m not channeling misfit elves or disillusioned cubicle drones.  Unless I’m not here.  Then I’ll be out, learning to install kitchen cabinets.

-Steve.

Tags: Covey, information management, information overload, marketing