At
one time I was reading:
Daily
Weekly
or bi-weekly
Monthly
as
well as numerous other interesting
articles and publications I came across.
All
of this at the same time as I was
researching companies identified in the publications, as well as in
numerous stock screens I use.
What
got to me eventually was the
pressure of receiving the next magazine or newspaper while I was
still busy, or have not even started reading, the previous issue.
And this while
already not having any more time
to allocate to reading.
Of course holidays
made the backlog even worse.
After
having hardly taken any holiday
for a year and a half because I was so busy I decided something had
to be done.
The rest of the article is how I
got rid of the information overload. Maybe it can help you too.
Here is how I did it:
Step
1
Take
some time off to determine that is
the most important tasks you want to achieve on a daily, weekly and
monthly basis.
For
me that was:
Daily
= Finding and researching high
probability investment ideas.
Weekly
= Writing a weekly newsletter
Monthly
= Reading at least one, ideally two, good
books on investing
Take
a look at the book called The
4 Hour Work Week
it helped me a lot with this step.
Step
2
Focus
your most productive time on what
you have determined is your most important tasks.
My
most productive time is early in the
morning. I usually start at 7:00 am. It is quiet, the telephone does not
ring and there is usually no-one around to disturb me.
Step
3
Determine
what information you need to
complete the tasks you have prioritised as the most important.
Step
4
Use
the internet to send you the
information, from step 3, directly so that you don't have to look for it.
This
can be done using Google
Alerts
and is explained in the article How
to automate internet searching in five minutes
You
can also use the email alert service
(if they have one) of the companies you follow.
Or you can use an third party services
for receiving company regulatory filings by email like InvestGate
for London listed companies and ShareData
for South African companies.
Step
5
Set
up a process where you can easily
find the information you have not read but may have to reference
in future.
Knowing
that you can find information
again reduces the pressure you may feel to read everything. This frees up
a lot of time.
I
got a really good solution from a fund manager
friend in Frankfurt (thanks Frank), that gets bombarded with research reports and recommendations daily.
He
solved his information overload
problem as follows:
-
All the information he
receives
gets saved to an external hard drive each week.
-
He then uses free
software tools
to index the information and make it searchable.
-
He first used a free program
called Copernic
Search
but when the amount of information got too large and
the program could not manage it effectively he switched to Google
Desktop.
Should
he find a company he is
interested in all he has to do is to type a few search terms and all
the latest, relevant research reports and emails are extracted.
All
of this without he having to read
any of the research sent to him.
Step
6
To lessen the time I spent reading I now scan through a magazine or newspaper, marking only articles that fit with the
results of Step 3, for in depth reading.
What
was the result of my
re-organisation?
First
I felt less pressure to read as
much and I started enjoying reading again.
But more importantly - I
was clearer as to what I needed to do
each day...
and
as a result...
I
got more done and I felt as if I
achieved more.
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