Managing Information Overload Training: Techniques for Working Smarter

Managing Information Overload Course Outline

• Organizing Your Approach

  • Eliminating unnecessary work
  • Exploiting your natural energy periods
  • Tailoring technology to reach your goals
  • Creating an efficient approach to e-mail and other electronic communications

• Maximizing Your Mind's Abilities

  Identifying your thinking styles

  • Assessing your visual, kinesthetic and auditory thinking styles
  • Adapting methods best suited for your style

  Engaging aspects of your memory

  • Realizing the effectiveness of memory chunking
  • Maximizing the advantages of long-term memory
  • Retrieving partially remembered facts and figures

• Integrating Creative Brain Strategies

  Harnessing memory patterns

  • Embedding new information through familiar associations
  • Improving the effectiveness of study and research periods
  • Stimulating new ideas and solving problems through lateral thinking

  Recording the creative process

  • Crafting time-efficient mind maps
  • Creating flexible strategies for effective learning

• Increasing Your Ability to Absorb Information

  Accelerating your reading speed

  • Benchmarking your current reading speed
  • Tuning your eyes to enable speed reading
  • Skimming and scanning the right information at the right level
  • Employing the tools of speed reading

  Interpreting documents

  • Constructing strategic information overviews
  • Consolidating your current knowledge base
  • Generating goal-seeking questions
  • Knowing when you have learned enough

  Managing electronic-based information, actions, tasks, and appointments

  • Leveraging technology to process information inputs
  • Identifying actions and tasks embedded within electronic communications
  • Organizing tasks into active, foreground, and background activities
  • Categorizing information for later reference

  Improving your information processing pace

  • Focusing your information needs
  • Creating documents and e-mails with efficient information-transfer structures
  • Triaging priorities rapidly with an efficient choice matrix

• Strengthening Your Memory

  The principles of mnemonics

  • Why mnemonics work
  • Visual, auditory, and combined mnemonics

  Remembering names and faces

  • Applying meaning to a name to make it memorable
  • Integrating names and appearances with whole-brain thinking
  • Cementing names with applied mnemonics
  • Rehearsing and reviewing to lock a face to a name

  Chaining information with links and cues

  • Retaining unstructured information with the Roman Room technique
  • Building cohesive information networks

  Creating memory scratch pads

  • Adapting your thinking style to the peg system
  • Scrutinizing the visual and auditory peg systems

• Launching Your Techniques Toolkit

  Maintaining mental preparedness

  • Preparing for meetings, presentations, and speeches
  • Refining goals and values to encourage motivation
  • Keeping your brain healthy, focused, and energized

  Distilling information with bit literacy

  • Determining what not to know
  • Recognizing when to extend your knowledge base

  Acquiring effective information transfer

  • Pyramiding data into a unified whole
  • Building a knowledge survival toolkit