Are You Guilty Of Being An "information Overload" Junkie?

By Author: Mary Holzrichter
Total Articles: 3
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If you're like me, perhaps you've been on the internet for
less than a year. For those first few months, you pretty
much just surf around absolutely dumbfounded by all the
information available in cyberspace. Wow! After a while,
you actually feel yourself becoming addicted, and you
can feel yourself being transformed into (Oh, no!) a
"Mouse Potato".

Since you love this internet thing so much, you decide you
may as well earn some money while maneuvering that mouse.
What a great idea! My own home business!

You join as many freelance "work at home" job sites as
possible, sending out your resume to all of them, and
hoping that you'll land that perfect administrative-type
job. Well, it appears that those jobs are few and far
between. For every job opening, there are literally
thousands of applicants. Unless you're a transcriptionist,
have website design or techie skills of some sort, they
are next to impossible to land.

So, it's on to a new quest!

By now you are definitely determined to make money on ...
... the
internet. So you go into a manic search for the perfect
affiliate program. After an exhaustive length of time and
a few bad judgments, you settle on one or two that you
feel are right for you and that you believe in.

Onward!

In the meantime, you have it in your head that you need a
website. When promoting your affiliate program, you
suddenly start noticing thousands of ads for information
on internet marketing. Many of the ads are for marketing
newsletters. Oh, my, look at all this information. So you
start signing up for just about every newsletter. Hm-mmm!
How to design a website, how to work the search engines,
how to get your ad to 600,000+ per day, how to write
effective ads, how not to write ads, how to make your
website sticky, how to publish your own newsletter, how to
be one of the 5% who make it through the first year, how to
not be one of the 95% who don't make it through the first
year, how to use autoresponders to run your follow-ups, how
to keep from having your ISP shut down by people yelling
"SPAM" at you, how to handle customer relations, how to do
viral marketing, how to brand your business, how to go about
campaign marketing, how to produce website traffic, and the
list goes on and on.

And I ended up spending most of my time reading them.
Sure, I learned a lot, but I don't even have a website yet!

Uh-Oh! Now look what has happened! You've got mountains
of printed out information on every imaginable subject,
your bookmarks are overloaded, your email folders are bulging,
AND you find you're not using any of it because you've got
SO much, you've forgotten about any of it specifically.
I won't even mention all those "had-to-have" eBooks. The
heaps of paper are piled so high that it has become an
insurmountable task to go through them, and the bookmarks
have strange titles which don't ring a bell, some of the
emailed newsletters are still setting where you put them
to read more in-depth later, and you get to the point where
you wonder,

"What the hell am I doing?"

Sometimes you get so frustrated, you just want to drown it
all out in a flood of tears!

Time Out!

Has your mind become paralyzed? Have you lost all sense of
priorities? Have you entered the "cyberland of no return"?

No, I don't think so. There's still hope.

I realize I've painted myself into a corner. I have to
leap over the wet paint to get out of this predicament.
I'm going about this all backwards. I should only be
gathering that information which I need for building my
website. The rest of the information can wait until I
reach that point.

And, YES, I'm an "information overload" junkie.

Here's what I'm going to do.

1. Unsubscribe to any newsletters, no matter how good they
are, and face the fact that maybe I don't NEED that
particular information yet. When I do, I can re-subscribe.
Anyway, I hope they'll let me do so!

2. Get rid of all those bookmarks. Only keep the ones I
recognize and use.

3. Clean out my email. If I haven't read it after six
months I'm never going to.

4. Read only those eBooks I've downloaded that are relevant
to the actual building of a website. The other ones can
just set there and wait. Delete the ones I'll never use.

5. Actually, start physically building my website.
Concentrate ONLY on building my website. Stop just thinking
about it, and DO it! I can always change it as I go along.
No one says it has to be the greatest thing since sliced
bread!

6. I MUST get organized. My computer room looks like
a tornado went through it. When someone comments, "How
do you FIND anything?" my reply is, "As long as no one
touches anything, I know exactly where everything is".
And I "usually" do. But since I'm going to "clean house",
I think I'll give the organization bit a try. Who knows,
maybe I'll like it. I'll keep the printed material that
is relevant to my needs, punch holes in it, and put it in
binders. The rest goes in the car trunk to the recycling
center.

7. I'll even make a schedule for myself such as an alloted
time to read the ezines I'll continue to subscribe to.
An amount of time to work on my website. An amount of time
to place ads. An amount of time to read email and respond.
Oh, and only certain times to hit that "get new messages"
button.

Hopefully, once I've "cleaned house", I can get rolling
"forward" instead of "backwards" with a cleared-out mind.

No more "information overload" for me. I've recovered!
About the Author Mary Holzrichter
The Newbie Club
The Most Respected PC And Internet
Learning Site On The Web!
http://newbieclub.com?abcs
mailto:holzrob3@naspa.net