Opportunity Overload
You’re not alone if at the end of each day you feel like you didn’t accomplish enough. And it’s no wonder. Everywhere we turn we see and hear messages about ways we could be making more money, how to be a one minute manager, businesses we could start, technology that could make our lives easier, 1001 places you should visit before you die, cars & trucks that you should buy, relaxation techniques you should try, and on and on. We’ve got opportunity overload.
There are so many opportunities to improve our lives, careers, relationships, etc., yet we have only a limited amount of time each day. How can we take advantage of some of these, and still enjoy our lives? How can we find the best and leave the rest?
Top Down Approach
Most of us are using a Top Down approach to life improvements. In this approach we sort of browse the universe of ideas that are out there, picking and choosing what looks interesting at the moment. The problem with this is we may be spending our time on things that are not really a top priority, thus crowding out the time we need for more important improvements. It’s like going browsing in the mall with your rent money. You buy some new boots and suddenly you don’t have enough money to pay the rent. We have to look at our time as just as valuable, even more so, than money.
Why do we use the Top Down approach? Simple. Because it’s much easier to browse than it is to analyze our needs and seek out the opportunities that will be most meaningful to us. But we pay the price of wasting our time and suffering unnecessary anxiety over missed opportunities.
Better Approach: Bottom Up
The better way to handle all the opportunities available is to approach it from the bottom up. That is with you at the bottom looking up at all the opportunities. Your goals become the filter. Think of it more like a decision tree. With the bottom up approach you start with the trunk (your goals) and then seek out only those branches (opportunities) that are important to you.
How to Use the Bottom Up Approach
1. Review your life goals. What are you trying to accomplish in your career, relationships, finances, and life in general? Which goals are most important to you right now? These should guide your search for opportunities.
2. Turn off daily input that is not targeted to your needs. For example you might stop watching the news and instead just read the highlights in a weekly magazine, such as The Week. Or you might turn off the TV altogether. Most people watch TV in the evening because they are too tired to do work on any of their goals. If you fall into this group, you might consider shutting off the TV, do some light reading instead and go to sleep earlier than usual. This way you can get up earlier than usual and work on one of your goals before work instead of watching mindless TV night after night and not making any headway on your goals.
3. Limit or stop random web browsing. Random inputs into our lives are good for creative sparks, but most of us get way more than we need and the creativity factor is far outweighed by the overload factor.
4. Seek out targeted web inputs. Use Google search or Google Alerts to find opportunities that align with your goals. Subscribe to RSS feeds of sites that consistently have content that is aligned with your goals. Cut out RSS feeds that don’t add real value to your life.
5. Be more targeted in your reading. Cut out magazines that you can’t keep up with. Cut out magazines that don’t align well with your interests or goals. If you read the newspaper, consider reading just certain sections that pertain to your goals or interests. Or you may want to just read the Sunday paper for the weekly recap. Again, there, limit the number of sections that you read. If it is a high priority goal to leisurely read the Sunday paper all morning, then definitely do that. If your goal is that you want to go places or do things on Sunday, then try limiting.
6. Capture the best ideas. When you do find opportunities that are a match with your goals, then write down those ideas in a notebook where you keep all your ideas.
7. Review the ideas you write down at least weekly. If you haven’t already taken action on them, decide which ones are most important to you and set your first action step to take.
8. At the end of the day take a few moments to review your day either mentally with eyes closed or through journaling. What did you accomplish? Did you make progress on your top priorities? Are you satisfied with that? What could you change tomorrow or going forward to improve? What was good about today? What are you grateful for? What will you do tomorrow?
9. Be at peace with your day that has passed. Relax and rest for the evening so that you can face tomorrow with renewed energy!
K. Stone is author of Life Learning Today, a blog about daily life improvement Should You Start Your Own Work at Home Business?, How to Stop Being “Busy” and Live Your Dream Life, How to Write a Book in 60 Days or Less, and How to Be a Great Salesperson.
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Comments
Lucas T. says on July 31st, 2007 at 2:29 pm
I read this article, and I thought about it, and maybe I’m suffering from opportunity overload. There are so many things out that there that I see and hear about and then once I hear about them I want to do them. I want to experience the things I see. I constantly feel like I’m not getting what I should be getting, because I see other people doing it and getting those results – what’s wrong with me? Why am I not enjoying that too? It depresses the crap out of me.
Now, I realize this is opportunity overload. The article basically says that the solution to this, the solution to feeling like you’re not accomplishing or experiencing enough, is to live a sheltered lifestyle. To live and ignore all the things that aren’t within your immediate realm of existence. To not be adventurous, not be curious; be complacent instead.
I think that is a poor solution. I don’t have a better one, but if the solution presented is more of a problem than the original problem then I think you shouldn’t use it.
Bertrand Russell is rolling in his grave now, screaming profanities at the author of this article.
rebecca says on July 31st, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I definitely agree with the writer of the article. This is the very basis of our conspicuous consumption culture: there is more to be had, more ideas, more things, more love, more better. It takes discipline and equanimity to be grateful for what we have and to resist the temptation (illusory) to “enhance” our lives with more. This is not complacency; this is cultivating contentment and compassion and gratitude.
KStone says on August 1st, 2007 at 12:21 am
@Lucas - thank you for sharing your thoughts! It’s not an easy problem to solve. It’s also not a major problem when you consider the real hardships some people have.
With that said, it is draining to let ourselves feel like we haven’t accomplished much everyday without taking some action to remedy this.
So instead of just reacting to every input in our lives without a filter, I suggest letting your goals and priorities be your filters for deciding whether to engage with each piece of input that is vying for your attention, time and money.
Cutting out or cutting down on TV time and news time and unfocused web surfing can help reduce all those inputs. Personally I don’t feel that it will lead you to a sheltered life. But what matters for you is how you feel.
If you feel that way then allow those inputs to remain (TV, advertisements, etc) and then just use your goals and priorities for choosing amongst them.
And at the end of the day we need to review our accomplishments and give ourselves credit for our good work. This is how to relieve some of that anxiety.
Thanks again.
@Rebecca - thank you for your thoughts too. I like what you said: “It takes discipline and equanimity to be grateful for what we have and to resist the temptation (illusory) to “enhance” our lives with more.” I agree. So important.
Thanks again!
Sathiya says on August 1st, 2007 at 5:01 am
Thanks for your nice article Stone. This is only beneficial to the people who are willing to get their goals done within some deadline, not for all the normal living people.
If you think it for a normal person there we can’t restrict them from anything or for anything - it is probably be go and enjoy everything because you have only very little time to live in this world
raj says on August 4th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
While I generally agree with your nine steps, I’ve never heard the term “top down approach” ever used in this way.
In the 20+ years I’ve heard/ used the term, it’s meant that you take a big goal, break it down into smaller steps, then attack each smaller step systematically until the big goal is complete.
This equivalent to building a house from the ground up. On the other hand, I’ve always heard “bottom up approach” used negatively - the equivalent of trying to build a house with no plan, or adding the door before the foundation.
So obviously I’m curious to know where your definitions of these terms come from.
K. Stone says on August 4th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
@Sathiya - thanks for your comment. It’s hard for anyone to “live on purpose” as opposed to kind of wandering through life. To some degree, many of us are trying to live on purpose. Hopefully this article will help some to seek that out a bit.
@Raj - my background is in the financial industry where “bottom-up” and “top-down” are used to describe an overall investing strategy. There are pros and cons to both, but neither is considered worse than the other. It’s just a matter of preference.
Top-down is starting with your asset allocation and working your way down to individual securities that fit into that allocation. Bottom-up refers to filtering for great securities first and worrying about allocation second.
So I simply applied that same notion to describe how some people approach the inputs of their life.
Thanks for your comments and question!
raj says on August 6th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Ah, very interesting how two sets of terms can have totally opposite meanings in different industries.
Jay Young says on August 7th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
Opportunity overload is a great phrase and describes just about everybody that I know including myself. We all walk a tight rope between being proactive, seeking new opportunities and keeping your eye on the prize long enough to receive it! The bottom up approach is at least a framework for making sense out of too many opportunities. At the end of the day the most effective people understand this dynamic and model thier behavior to maximize their personal returns (see for example http://www.areyouineffective.com). I believe that the author is spot on with this assessment.
KStone says on August 8th, 2007 at 10:51 am
@Raj - so true.
@Jay - thanks for your addition to the topic!
youtube says on February 25th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Ah, very interesting how two sets of terms can have totally opposite meanings in different industries.