Learn to become an Information Master

You are the information you consume. Your choice of the information you take in determines whether you become who you want to be or who others want you to be. This chapter is focused on clearly understanding your purpose for engaging with information, the WHY, to shape your relationship with information, the HOW of your habits and daily practices. 

The interactive elements of the course will guide you through developing an understanding of your higher-order purpose and the achievements and impact to which you aspire. These will be applied to selecting and refining your information priorities to best support what is most important to you in your life and work.

Having established your purpose, this chapter will help you identify the different information domains of your life. Within each of these domains you will establish the core topics in that domain, so that you have a detailed understanding of your information priorities, what truly matters to you and what deserves your scarce attention. 

In particular you will consider and identify the areas of expertise that will support your life’s directions in the present and the future, and the web of topics that will enable you develop world-class expertise. You will be going through all of the domains of your life that matter to you, including your ventures, wellbeing, passions, and pinpointing the types of news that are most relevant to you.

This chapter covers the principles and practices of effective filtering in a world of overload. The essence of information mastery lies in being able to discern the information that serves your objectives and interests, so you can readily find that and simply ignore the rest. This ability draws on your understanding of your purpose, and shapes the quality of your life in making sure you are focused on what is important.

You will learn how to apply critical concepts including a framework for information filtering, the time value of information, the meaning and value of Bayesian thinking, how to go back to source to verify and expand your knowledge, and steps to limit inbound information.

One of the primary foundations of information mastery is intelligent selection and refinement of your sources of information. You will learn how to manage your information sources like an investment portfolio, achieving a balance that achieves the best possible outcomes for your time and effort. To manage your information portfolio effectively you will apply the concept of information portals, identifying the best balance between categories of sources such as direct to media, individuals, news aggregators, feeds, and social media. Selecting the media formats that best suit the information type and your cognitive style will optimize your results.

In the interactive section of this chapter you will select the sources that best support the areas of expertise and topics that you identified in the Purpose chapter, creating a lattice of topics and sources that will be invaluable in guiding your daily information activities. You will also identify how you can best develop and leverage your personal information networks.

Your most valuable resource is your attention. How you allocate your scarce attention will make the difference between overwhelm or flourishing in your life. This chapter dives into the power of attention and the six attention modes that make up your engagement with information. 

Understanding the attention modes and their role in your daily information practices will provide a powerful foundation for you to allocate your attention as effectively as possible. 

This chapter covers the principles and practices of superior information productivity. True information masters demonstrate a common set of practices in how they deal with information. Yet even those who excel at creating value with unlimited information can substantially improve their performance by becoming more aware of those practices and how they can be refined to maximize outcomes. 

In this chapter you will learn a wide variety of high-impact practices. In the section on Attention practices you will discover how to reduce notifications, manage expectations, and actively exercise your attention through meditation and other daily practices, and how to develop the intense focus of deep thinking and content creation. 

In the section on synthesis, arguably the most valuable capability today, you will discover a variety of techniques for enhancing your abilities. These include developing active open-minded thinking, identifying creative connections, implementing integrative thinking, building richer and more useful mental models, and fostering the states of mind for insight.

The ultimate purpose of knowledge is to think and act better, creating the outcomes you desire. This chapter shows you how to build a system for information productivity that best supports you. There are many software tools available that individually assist our information productivity, yet none are sufficient in themselves. We each need to select the set of tools and approaches that best serve our purpose.

In this chapter you will be introduced to a practical framework for your information flow, to assist you in deciding how you can best capture, transfer, store, access, and organize the relevant information your encounter. You will learn about the most useful tools and techniques to support your information mastery, including implementing feed readers well, setting up alerts, and more. In particular you will discover the three main categories of note-taking tools: general, structured, and connected, so you can select and implement the optimal way of accessing and applying the high-value information you encounter through the day. 

You will also learn about the importance of concept frameworks in developing useful knowledge. Depending on your cognitive style you may find frameworks based on trees, networks, or systems, or some combination of them, to be the most effective. You will discover a variety of the visual techniques and tools that can be used to support how you develop high-value, actionable knowledge. Selecting and implementing an information system that suits your needs will transform your capacity to manage and process information. 

Thriving amid an excess of information requires optimizing how you allocate your scarce attention. This chapter guides you through developing an information productivity schedule that best supports your objectives. You will learn the principles of effective filtering, how to consider your individual chronotype, foundational protocols for scheduling your focus time and information activities, and how you can apply the principles of timeboxing to substantially enhance your information productivity. 

In the interactive section of the course you will be guided in establishing a preliminary schedule for each of the attention modes that comprise your information practices, allowing you to optimize your time and value from engaging with information.

In this final chapter you consolidate the lessons and activities through the course so you can put these into practice into your daily life, with the intent of dramatically enhancing your information productivity and advancing your life’s objectives. 

You will review and if needed revise the detailed Personal Information Plan that you have developed through the course, and establish an action plan for immediately putting this into practice in your daily work and life.  

Completing the course will vastly accelerate your journey to information mastery. Yet you will still need to implement the practices you have developed and continue to refine them as you discover what works best and your objectives and situation evolve. You will have free access to the interactive course as you continue to enhance your information capabilities, able to come back to revise and continually improve the Personal Information Plan you have created, and access the many new resources that will be added to the program in coming months and beyond.