Are you suffering from information overload?

Information overload is a pretty big buzz word these days. Lots of people claim to be “suffering” from information overload, and don’t even have the slightest idea what it means. Or worse, aren’t consuming nearly enough information, and are still complaining that they’re overloaded. That couldn’t be you though, could it? Of course, not, you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum.

You’re the type who really does consume so much information, that you can legitimately be worried about overloading yourself with it all. You’re the type who finds out about a new strategy or concept, and stays up half the night deep diving on it, until you’ve learned everything there possibly is to know about the subject at hand.

Is it possible that you’re overloaded? And is it possible that overloading yourself with all that information isn’t even helpful? We’re going to talk about exactly that today.

When information overload becomes a problem

Let’s just pretend for a second, that you are coming dangerously close to having information overload. This might even be true for you. You know a ton more than your colleagues about things like SEO, WordPress, internet marketing and all of the other things contained in all that information you’re constantly devouring.

You probably think this is a good thing. Knowing more than the next guy certainly can’t hurt you, can it? Here’s the thing though, and it’s a huge thing: All that information doesn’t help you unless you actually use it. Even then, it only helps you if you use it right.

There’s probably a ton of people out there, all in your industry, doing financially much better than you, with only half of the information you have. With only half the information you have, they are nowhere close to becoming overloaded, yet they are still much more successful than you are. What gives?

Usually in these cases, the problem isn’t that you know too much, it’s that you act too little. You spend your time deep diving on new concepts, and instead of spending the next few hours implementing those concepts, you deep dive on something else. You learn too much, and implement too little.

Still, we aren’t trying to say all of this information is bad. Knowing all this information can quickly make you an expert in real estate. The only difference, is when it stays as just knowledge, and isn’t acted upon, you are an expert in real estate theory, not real estate practice.

This means all it takes is someone a little more ambitious than you are, to take you down. They could take less than half of your advice and implement it all twice as effectively, because they’re actually implementing it. While you could pick apart the way they’re implementing things, claiming you have the knowledge of how to do it better, you don’t really know unless you try implementing yourself.

How to avoid the knowledge trap

For many people, this is the difficult part. They have trouble trying to strike up a balance between learning and implementing. Many people say learning never stops, but we say the same thing about implementing. When you stop implementing, you stop growing and improving, just like when you stop learning.

To remedy this, we recommend creating a strict balance of time spent learning to time spent implementing. How this balance will work will depend on who actually does the implementing in your office. If you have someone you can easily hand off tasks to, then don’t spend too much time implementing. You’ll want your implementation time to be spent on summarizing the concept and explaining the process to whoever will be implementing for you. If that’s the case for you, then try to keep a 2:1 balance of learning vs implementation. So for every 2 hours you spend learning, you spend 1 hour making sure you put the steps in place to get the concepts implemented.

If you’ll be implementing on your own, then you’ll need a little more time, so a 1:1 ratio will be better. So for every 1 hour, or 2 hours you spend learning, you’ll spend an equal amount of time implementing.

You’ll be tempted to go back to learning – it’s easier, it’s passive – but don’t fall into that trap. Make sure you spend the same amount of time implementing. Because at the end of the day, no business was ever successful simply because of how much the founder knew – they were successful because of how much the founder did. Don’t confuse the two.

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