Bleary eyed and reaching for your coffee, you boot up your computer and start your daily diet of content consumption. It is a filling nourishment of words, intel, fired up neurons and brain overload. Or at least it can be. Personally, I can spend hours reading all of the articles on social platforms, news aggregators, daily digests, emails and newsletters. Sometimes I think my head will explode.

Research demonstrates that we take in five times as much information as we did 30 years ago, raising huge challenges to organize it all.

We are drowning in data.

In a 2010 LexisNexis study, 62% of workers felt as though their quality of work suffered at times because they couldn’t sort through the information they needed fast enough.

There is so much to digest and learn. I could be bookmarking and saving content all day long. There are hundreds of talented bloggers and business owners sharing their incredible knowledge of tools, tips, recommendations and experiences. It can be overwhelming. Think of how many times you get sucked in to the black hole searching, clicking, and redirecting. It’s a vortex.

How do you manage all of the content? There are tools to organize your content or to help you search and save but you also need to decide what you are going to do with the information. Daniel Levitan, author of “The Organized Mind,” says “Whenever we feel overwhelmed by everything we need to keep track of in life, we talk about wanting to get organized.”

You’ve chosen your sources, thought leaders and industry favorites to follow and “study” in your own college auditorium of higher learning. That’s what it sometimes feels like for me and without the outrageous tuition costs.

What is the purpose? Business or personal? How does it apply to your business? Customers? Colleagues?

What are your content goals?

1. Self-education
2. Curation
3. Repurposing
4. Inspirational
5. Research
6. Love of reading

If you’re like most of us, you have a business to run and can’t spend every waking moment culling and sifting through information. It’s a full time job. Who has the time to sit and read all day when you are trying to live the entrepreneurial dream?

Use filters and keywords help to refine your searches. 

This will help to save time and improve your overall content management.  If you have some systems in place, it will be much easier to sort through all of the posts you want to read and combat your information hangover.

Researchers tend to agree that it’s not the volume of information that is the problem; it’s our inability to organize and process it all without experiencing “information overload, or what neuroscientists like to call “cognitive overload. Saga Briggs

Design a system that works for you to enhance your time management and productivity as well as minimize on the extreme overload of data and what to do with it all. A method to your madness is guaranteed to keep you on track and focused. Systems and processes are the architectural structure of your success and productivity.

Establish some routines; otherwise you hit a wall, letting things go and opportunities are forfeited. The routines could be time limits or specific times you will be searching, saving and filing. Time block when you will surf. If you discover something important during the day, “save” it somewhere to revisit later. Don’t let it be a distraction and take you away from your current task at hand.

Decide what to keep or implement NOW based upon it’s perceived impact on your goals. Prioritize to your needs.  Is it something you must have or must know? If so, how soon will you be needing it? Use your organizing tools to keep track of the data, being mindful of how you will use it and when. Some articles may have a more immediate use while others are purely for reference. You decide, but take action.

Declutter: remember to go through your folders or storage options so they haven’t blossomed into an overload of organized data. Purge the old to make room for the new. There’s no sense in just letting everything pile up and multiply as that will defeat the purpose of your systems.

How do you challenge your content zombie? What helpful tools can you suggest?