Use This Framework To Stay Ahead Of Everyone

Two or three centuries earlier, it was difficultfor any common person to know much about the wider world. The amount of information an ordinary personcan get his hands on was limited. There were no radios, televisions, daily newspapersor public libraries. Even if you were among the lucky few, whowere literate and had access to a private library there was not much to read other thannovels and religious tracts. 

The information was scarce and Besides, theempires that ruled back then were busy banning books and censoring any information that wasagainst their worldview. Spanish empire, Russian empire, Japanese,British and the ottomans everyone was busy in censoring information. But the empires of the 21st century, I meanour beloved governments are themselves busy in spreading misinformation or propagandawhatever you choose to call it. In this age of information abundance and overload,those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they canconcentrate on what's really important to them. And to help you become such a person, whocan differentiate between what is important and what is not, before this video ends Iam going to show you some fascinating systems capable of filtering out unwanted noise andinformation. 

Hi, guys myself Pratik and welcome to eclectic. Here we talk about our past present and thefuture and today let us critically analyze our present and create effective systems thatcan make our everyday life more peaceful and more productive. But first lets understand our enemy and whatexactly is it that we are facing. The Age of Information OverloadIn the second half of the 20th century, with the rise of technology and the internet, governmentsaround the world realized that they were no longer able to control the spread of information. So instead of wasting their time on censorship,they decided to use their resources to become part of the modern information ecosystem thatarose after the invention of the internet. And as we humans were about to enter the 21stcentury we faced something sinister – The CNN effect – In other words 24/7 news cycle. 

This theory states that 24hour news networks,such as CNN, can influence the general political and economic climate. (By the way, A fun fact American news networkCNN was the first news network to start the 24 hours news cycle. )Then in the early 21st century, the social media came along. Which not only made information more accessiblebut also easily shareable. And that is how we entered the age of informationoverload. Everyone nowadays is busy slamming his orher views on our faces. And We the people are left confused havingno clue about how to make sense of this much information. Today each of us has access to more informationthan we can reasonably use. Then we have our 21stcentury selfhelp gurus,who keep telling us that we should read more books, watch good documentaries listen tothe audiobooks and podcasts while travelling. 

If that is not enough they say listen to theaudiobooks at 2x speed. But is that really good advice? Is our brain capable of stuffing that muchinformation every day? Now many of you would ask – hey Pratik whatabout those articles who claim our brain can store billions of books and the entire internet? To them here is what I have to say. There is a difference between a hard discand a human being. Memory storage devices do not have goals theirprimary job is to store the information not to utilize it. Humans on the other hand have goals and toreach those goals they need to be able to properly utilize the information they haveas well as acquire new information. Human intelligence cannot be measured basedon the storage capacity of the brain, it is measured based on our ability to solve complexproblems by utilizing the knowledge or information we have. That is why we should consume informationmindfully and should only focus on consuming the information that will help us achieveour goals or serve our purpose. 

There is fundamental difference between informationand knowledge Information is nothing but the refined form of data, which can be helpfuljust to understand the meaning of something. Knowledge on the other hand is the relevantand objective information that helps us in drawing conclusions. Too much information will not make us smarter,it will make us more confused. To make my selfsound more authentic let meinvite psychology into our discussion. (how does the brain work?) At this point, we are at the verge of beingable to discover how much information the central nervous system is capable of processing. It seems we can manage somewhere between 4to 7 bits of information such as differentiated sounds, visual stimuli, our emotions and sensingtemperature at any one time. That is equivalent of processing 50 to 100bits of information per second. And while performing intelligent or consciousactivities such as reading or playing the piano that capacity comes down to below 50bits per second. It all sounds confusing right. 

I get it guys, for people like us, it is difficultto make sense of scientific numerical data. So to make it simple consider this fact thatdemonstrates the limitations of our brain –To truly understand what another person is saying we must process 40 bits of informationeach second. That suggests that understanding what twoor three people are saying simultaneously is theoretically impossible. We couldn’t, for instance, be aware of thespeaker’s expressions, nor could we wonder about why they are saying what they are sayingor notice what they are wearing if we truly want to understand what speaker has to say. Even habitual acts like using a smartphoneand driving a car if performed simultaneously can get us into trouble. (The Multitasking Myth)Multitasking is not something we should be proud of. We often think that combining tasks will saveus time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect. Even those who claim to be good at multitaskingare not very productive. In fact, they are some of the least productivepeople. 

When we multitask, our brain switches backand forth between one task to another and unlike computers; our brain is not designedto run parallel processes simultaneously. It has been scientifically shown that if wecontinually ask our brains to switch back and forth between tasks, we waste time, makemore mistakes, remember less and our overall productivity decreases by 60 per cent. So if we multitask, we end up spending allour energy alternating between tasks, instead of focusing on doing one of them well. Therefore, the bottom line is we need to mindfullyuse our psychic energy. It is very difficult to think or act clearlywhen we are drowning in information. Just storing the information is not enough,the information we consume must be easily accessible or retrievable, in other words,we must be able to utilize the information we consume to accomplish our goals and tomake it so we need to organize it using efficient systems. 

We need systems that would tell us what isimportant and what is not. System that would transform the raw informationwe consume into concrete and useful knowledge. But are there any systems available? I have been wondering about this for a whileand finally, I have come up with two solutions – I came across the first solution whileI was listening to an audiobook on storytel app so I pulled it out from there. A technique which was used by 34th us presidentand the second solution is something I use every day. I have successfully encoded that system inmy brain. So let's get into it. The 34th president of the united states Eisenhowerfaced an information overload when he became the president in 1953. He struggled to manage all the facts and fictionthrown at him. And to solve this problem he ended up inventinga system to organize information which is now called the Eisenhower decision matrixor Eisenhower box. 

This matrix orders our priorities by theirratio of urgency and importance. First, understand the difference between urgentand important. Urgent tasks are things that you feel likeyou need to react to: emails, phone calls, texts, news stories etc. Meanwhile, important tasks are things thatcontribute to our longterm growth. You just need to be aware of this differenceand then use the Eisenhower Matrix to come up with a clear framework for making the decisionsover and over again. By using this matrix, you can separate youractions based on four possibilities. 1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately). 2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you willschedule to do later). 3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you willdelegate to someone else). 4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that youwill eliminate). Eisenhower Matrix is particularly useful becauseit pushes us to question what is truly necessary. On his blog writer of the bestselling bookatomic habits, James clear states that, if you simply eliminate all of the things youwaste time on each day then you probably wouldn't need any tips on how to be more productiveat the things that matter. 

Even the ancient philosophers were aware ofthis strategy, in his meditations, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius says, ask yourself at everymoment, is this necessary? Now the Eisenhower matrix is more helpfulin decision making but it does not involve the learning process – How can we identifywhat books we should read, what documentaries we should watch, what audiobooks and podcastwe should listen to. To figure out what information is essentialfor me to achieve my goals. I created a system which I Goaldirected informationframework. GDIF I personally use it and here is how itworks – So this what is use to regulate the informationI consume. It is based on a simple philosophy. Consuming information must be a goaldirectedprocess. Every piece of information you consume mustpush you towards your goal. I think it won’t be properly visible likethis – let me show a digital version of it. Ok, these are my four goals here. In each box, I have mentioned the subjectsand the skills I need to keep learning to make progress. In other words, I only need to consume informationrelated to the things that are mentioned in the red colour. 

The books I read, the audiobook and podcastsI listen to and documentaries I watch must all be related to these things. I try to avoid anything that does not comeunder this framework. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail that’slife. But having this framework means being sureabout what matters to me and what doesn’t. For example, after coming up with this framework,I realized that being active on social media is not helpful to my cause. So I stopped using them altogether. Now I just open them when I upload a new videoand want to share its link on them. If you look closely or else if you take abroader look at my information framework, you will notice that all of my goals complementeach other. They help each other. I make youtube videos to offer people a newperspective in that process I consume information related to philosophy, history, psychologyetc. Then my third goal is to figure out how mycountry can be improved. For that, I need to consume information relatedto politics. 

Even consuming information about the thingsmentioned in the second box can help understand how a country works or how people think. And the things mentioned in the first boxcan be used to execute the information I gain. In other words, utilizing that informationto create something like this very youtube video you are watching. The fourth goal is to learn art forms. I choose acting and filmmaking. You can choose singing, dancing, playing theguitar – anything you like. Again I can use acting and filmmaking skillsto make better videos. To learn how to become confident in frontof the camera or to make good documentaries. It is very essential to find intersectionslike these to accomplish a broad range of goal with few activities. Creativity is all about connecting dots, recognizingpatterns and combining the knowledge different schools of thoughts. To give you an example,I make videos on history as well as selfimprovement and I was thinking about how can I combinethese two subjects. 

After thinking for a while, I ended up creatingthis video – Top 12 lessons to learn from historic leaders. In this video, you learn history as well asget some good lessons on selfimprovement. Now in the center of this framework, insidethat red circle, I have mentioned the important activities I need to master or perform toget things done. They are Reading, Writing, Acting and Editing. These activities cover everything I do. When you have this kind of framework it becomeseasier to systematically tie important things together and boil all your priorities downto few most important things you should be doing to achieve your goals. Try this and you will realize that just afew activities can help accomplish a broad range of goals. And a small tip, Don’t have more than fourgoals if you list more than four goals then it won’t be a list of goals it would bea wish list. Look life can get a lot easier if we justspend one hour every day on selfassessment. People these days just start playing videogames or scrolling through social media feeds as soon as they finish their work. But guys Sit and think. Reflect on your choices and then it becomesfar easier to reinvent your life just the way you want it.