Managing Information Overload: Techniques for Working Smarter

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Course Overview

Information overload is a daily occurrence and can lead to reduced productivity, added stress, and decreased attention span and memory. This course provides the skills needed to process fast-paced information to develop a competitive edge. You learn to sharpen your comprehension, memory and speed-reading skills. You learn how to improve your focus, respond quickly to change, manage e-mail, and rapidly comprehend and retain information.

Course Workshops

• Throughout the course, you gain practical skills in managing information effectively. Workshops include:
• Analysing left- and right-brain characteristics
• Profiling your personal thinking style and the styles of others
• Implementing speed-reading techniques
• Identifying actions, tasks, and appointments within e-mails
• Applying a step-by-step process to remember names and faces
• Triggering lateral thinking with mind maps

Audience

This course is valuable for those who want to improve their productivity and work successfully in fast-paced environments.

Skills Gained

You Will Learn How To

• Increase your productivity with effective information management techniques
• Adapt your learning and thinking styles to rapidly acquire business-critical skills
• Apply creative strategies, including mind maps, for processing information
• Adopt speed-reading techniques to quickly digest reports and other information
• Manage actions, tasks, and appointments within a comprehensive e-mail processing methodology
• Develop advanced memory skills to retain important information

Course Outline

Organising Your Approach

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

Maximising 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

• Realising the effectiveness of memory chunking
• Maximising 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 e-mail actions, tasks and appointments

• Leveraging technology to process information inputs
• Identifying actions and tasks embedded within e-mails
• Organising tasks into active, foreground and background activities
• Categorising 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
• Scrutinising 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
• Recognising when to extend your knowledge base

Acquiring effective information transfer

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

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