Mind the Beginner

Information is all around us, we get bombarded with it every single waking minute. And if this passive information (TV, radio) isn’t enough we constantly look for new information. After all you – my appreciated reader – are reading this blog after all. You sought it out and decided to read this post in order to find something you didn’t know or to reaffirm what you already knew.

Even the least (self) educated person in the western world today knows more than prehistoric man. But the speed of this information is getting the better of us. Take twitter for example, a great resource for information but if you follow enough people it’s hard to get the information you’re looking for. To help with that there are some great apps to handle twitter. My personal favorite is Tweetdeck in this matter. 

There are more “hacks” out there to help with the information overload. Lifehacker writes about those things daily. However, there are some skills that are not digital, they are true skills you will want to develop in order to get on top of things. I distinguish three groups of these:

1. Information intake
2. Information processing
3. Information storage and recollection

Information intake is actually the most important of them all. We need a way to effectively get the information we want. Seeing the speed at which information is presented we need a fast way of doing this. How do we take in most of our information?  Either through our ears or our eyes. Speeding up listening isn’t going to get you far, the big gain in intake is to be had in the eyes. Google reader and tweetdeck both present information for us to read, the only way to get through this information faster is to read faster. Yes, the infamous skill of “speedreading” is what I’m talking about. The skill to read 1000 words a minute or more. (The average speed is 200-250 words per minute) Although some claim it’s a myth, with some training you can raise your reading speed towards the 1000 words per minute without loosing comprehension. Just think about it, reading blogposts in half of the time or faster. That certainly would save you some time each day. 

Information processing  to me is what we do with our information, it’s what we do immediately after getting the information through reading or perhaps listening (think about college). We need an effective way to handle things. Take notes perhaps. But how do we take effective notes? Again, there is one system that seems to keep popping up out there and it’s called “mindmapping”. Although this system has it’s advantages for me it just didn’t cut it. I’m actually very bad at taking notes on just about anything. That being said, If I want to make notes I do it all in a simple small moleskine notebook. There are some attributes of mindmapping that did help me though. The main thing being images. I have that little notebook within reach at all times and jot down anything I might want to recall later. It’s full of one-liners from all the blogs I follow and quotes from books or conversations. While reading about mindmapping it got clear to me that images stay in your mind much better than words. We think in images so why not take notes in images right? This brings us to our third skill.

Information storage and recollection to me is being able to remember what you read. Even if that was a few weeks or months ago. How do we do that? It’s very simple but you need to practice it a lot: use images to remember. Exaggerate anything and everything and make it ridicules. If I was talking about an elephant I saw in the zoo, that wouldn’t be something you could remember. But just imagine a purple elephant on a unicycle holding a baseball bat with it’s trunk getting ready to take a swing at the giant pumpkin you’re throwing at it. Our memory works with images and remembers anything out of the ordinary we throw at it. 

So what is in this for the beginner? Think about all the information you are taking in every day and rethink how you deal with it all. Can you optimize the process? How do you handle all the information? Please tell me all about it.

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