Prioritizing in the Age of Information Overload

Is it just me or is anyone else overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge you can access about everything? There seem to be endless resources and platforms that help you understand and consider how to "be" better. Heck, this platform is yet another one of them. But my aim is to share tools that help you to let go of the desire to just continue to learn and pursue understanding. Instead, I hope to find tools and resources for you (and let’s be honest- also for myself) that help me act from a more intuitive, or inherent, perspective. To me this means focusing on a few main priorities that help to guide, but not rule, my day to day decisions. 

First, let’s frame the situation: we all want to live meaningful lives and there is not one best way to do that. Even the most experienced or most well-read may differ in their opinions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. And in our world, we tend to follow a two-step approach to solving problems. First, we try to understand the problem. And second, we make a decision and act based on that understanding. But what if there is no way to understand the “problem” well? What if we just acknowledge that we all are growing and changing and we hope to live well and be safe and continue to develop in positive ways as we age? 

Independence may look like many different things depending on who you are. It could be independence with physical tasks. It could be independence with financial or work demands. It could be independence with character decisions like being respectful or kind without coaching or discipline. Or any number of other competing priorities. 

So as a someone who has really tried her best to learn everything she could to know how to decide what was the “right” thing to do, I have decided to let go of all of the learning and adopt a more simple framework to help guide me in the blissfully unending job of living well. This framework relies on determining a few straightforward priorities based on where I am in life.

As I focus on my main priorities, I am able to act with greater confidence and clarity, and I am able to remain calm in situations where things are not unfolding in a seamless or pleasant way. After all, I have to learn my own lessons too: there is a lot that I can’t control, but I can accept the reality of the situation and take responsibility for my actions to help me be the type of person I want to be. So instead of trying to constantly seek the right answers, I’ll accept that I will never fully understand or know it all. And I will act from a place of love and abundance by remembering guiding principles, and evolve my principles as we all age and grow.