The 4 Step Strategy for Self Confessed Improvement Junkies.

Many of you who read this will do so because you love to mull over other people thoughts. To see how they align with your world view, whether you agree, disagree, what nuggets of truth you can take away and action. Most of all, you love to improve!

You also know the feeling of having 400 unread emails because you can’t possibly read all the newsletters and productivity advice you have received in one day. The subject heading basically reads your thoughts out loud so you can’t delete them in case you miss out on that game changing vampire killer. Your consumption habits can make you feel like a junkie.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you have had three sources of information coming at you at the same time? A documentary in the background on TV, a You Tube video playing on the Ipad that you are listening too and a fantastic article you opened through Facebook which you’re trying to read on your iPhone. I Have! It’s the pinnacle of information overload and it’s at that point that you realise you’ve reached junkie status.You’re not doing yourself any favours when you open all your newsletters and skim through them. All you’re doing is boosting the writers read stats.

An important lesson that I learned recently: Don’t resign yourself to consume information just because you subscribed to it.

Here’s a four step hard and fast strategy to help quench your thirst for self-help information through email newsletters.

Organise it
Set up your newsletters, subscriptions and blog alerts to go into a separate folder or separate tab in your email inbox. Most email services will allow you to add tabs so you’ll have your primary email tab and what ever else you set up. You could even take this a step further and send them to a separate email address! I’d bet it would take you 20 minutes to sign up for a new gmail account and resubscribe to all of your favourite blogs and newsletters. Now they will all in the one place and won’t distract you from the priority emails that you need to address first.
Shortlist it
When you sit down to read your emails, specifically your newsletters tab/email, Spend 5 minutes short listing your “must read” list. During the 5 minutes either read the headings or simply open the email, read the first three lines then close it. Once you have reached your time limit don’t open any more of the emails.
Dissect it
Spend the time that you would have spent on getting through 10 0r 15 emails on just 1 email. Yep, just 1. Dissect it. Read it to understand the writers point of view. Notice what comes to mind when you read each paragraph. Critique every sentence. With this one piece of information, consider how it applies to you, whether you agree with all of it or some parts of it. You will find that this type of applied thinking will reap far more rewards than simply skimming through information with the end goal being to get to the end of all the information!
Write about it
To consolidate your ideas, thoughts, learnings and musings, start writing about the piece. It’s incredibly powerful to put your thoughts into words. Write down what you agree with and what you disagree with. When you put your mind into production mode rather than consumption mode your ideas become embedded.

Try this 4 step strategy for 1 week and you will soon realise that you don’t miss the information that you have missed, and to top it off you will be more likely remember and apply what you have read.