If it had not been for infobesity, I would have certainly been a superstar, if not in Hollywood, at least in my profession.

Infobasity is an undesirable state of mind that I used to suffer from until a few days back. Lots of calories and no exercise makes a person obese. In the same way, too much information consumed (from the web and books and newspapers) without much action on it had made me info-obese. Thankfully, I have successfully overcome it.

Here’s how I managed to land up into this situation every time I start to work on something new. Whenever I have to work on a new idea or a project, my first default action step is to find out all the available information about it. To make myself feel good and grand about it, I call this my R&D stage. Feels professional, and I start feeling instantly useful. I start surfing the web to gather all the possible information on my topic of R&D. An eager self-learner like me gets impressed and stimulated by the vast amount of information available online on my topic of interest. As generous streams of data flow towards me, my heart overflows with gratitude for the founders of the internet and the authors of the online content flowing to me. I start feeling the presence of God’s hand in my life as he makes so much wisdom available to me disguised as free data.

The stimulated state makes me ask for more. Information is currency, and I am hungry for more of it. And I start flowing into the rivers of hundreds of quality blogs, research papers, news articles and whatnot. I don’t want to miss out on anything that can be useful for my project. I start to fear that I might miss out on something critical, something life-changing. (Interestingly, they have a name for this state of mind too, and it’s called FOMO- the fear of missing out). I cannot restrict myself from clicking and opening up new windows of information out of the fear of missing out on a piece of critical information or an important insight. I want to know more because knowledge is power.

To prove myself as an old-school, serious learner, I do not hesitate to order from Amazon the bestselling books written by domain experts on my topic of concern. My R&D has to be detailed and complete.

After swimming for a few days in the enormous ocean of information, I start getting overwhelmed with the depth of the topic and the amount and quality of work done by sage people before I have even started. I now start feeling my littleness in comparison to them. I start feeling anxious and sceptical about my capabilities at executing the work related to that topic. I create excellent self-justifying prophecies about why I need to do more R&D before I start to execute real work.

That is how I used to become a classic case of paralysis by analysis.

Infobesity also called information overload creates paralysis by analysis. It pulls you into a never-ending trap of information searching and prevents you from taking the most important action required from you at the moment.

Fun apart, I know that I am not alone to experience infobesity. I know that it is an issue faced by many inquisitive and self-learning people like me and you and prevents us from actually taking winning actions. Let’s get serious and find out concrete ways to win over this infobesity. I have successfully overcome this undesired state of mind.

In my next post, I shall be telling you how I overcame infobesity and became super productive and creative.