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Capture
The essential survival skill for leaders buckling under information overload.
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Pity your poor mail carriers. Their shoulders must burn under the mailbag strap as they haul each day's load. On a recent day, chosen at random, my mail drop included:
I dropped the mail and booted up my laptop—and found 17 e-mails in my inbox. To live in our Information Age is hard; to lead is even harder. How can you keep up? Learn what's important? Filter out what's not? Grow as a person? Get things done? I've asked those questions often. And I've noticed a subtle but key difference between leaders who get things done and leaders who don't. We're all awash in information; some leaders swim while others sink. The difference, I now know, lies in the essential skill of selecting only the information most needed, and then making use of it. To keep from drowning in a heaving sea of information, you need to spot the strong floating timbers, swim to them, and hang on with all your strength. This is the essence of a leadership skill I've dubbed "Capture." Capture is not complicated and doesn't cost money. It asks for no herculean multitasking, no leather binders or color-coded lists. Capture should not be confused with orderliness. Two people I know who use Capture effectively work in cluttered offices and sometimes lament their lack of organization. Capture is not a neat desk; it's a mindset to grow, to learn, to accomplish, and a system to help you do that. Capture turns intention into action. Capture involves three simple skills that build on each other, like taking a photograph: point, focus, and shoot. Point: Look for your key information areas (and skip the rest)Capture begins with a simple, wonderfully freeing premise: I do not need to know everything. A few short generations ago, it could be said, Information Is Power. That was true when there wasn't enough of it. Today, the motto should read: Information Is Fatigue. We get too much information, and a high percentage of it is inane, meaningless, enervating. (Do I really need to know whom Anne Heche is dating?) Richard Saul Wurman writes in Information Anxiety 2 (Macmillan, 2000): "Information was once a sought-after and treasured commodity, like a fine wine. Now, it's regarded more like crabgrass, something to be kept at bay." No, information alone is no longer power. What is power is the right information, at your fingertips, when you need it. The fact we must focus our learning should be self-evident, but for many years, I struggled to believe it. Growing up, I admired DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and other polymaths who excelled in multiple fields. |             |
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