Four Steps to Making the Most of Information Products

Over the past few years, I’ve accumulated a lot of information. I’m not thinking here about the stuff in my head (that’s another post entirely).  I mean books, ebooks, audio files, course materials, blog posts which I’ve bookmarked, and so on.

Lots of those books sit gathering dust on the shelves. Maybe I read them once, but I couldn’t tell you know what I learnt from them. I’ve got a bunch of audio files I’ve never listened to. I’ve bookmarked all sorts of things “to read” in Delicious, which I’ve not gone back to. I’ve got a bunch of free ebooks packed with material that are waiting patiently on my hard-drive.

A couple of weeks ago, I was searching back through my diary for something, and I came across a note to myself to go through a particular online course.

I realised I’d spent $50 on that course and I’d dipped into all of one lesson. I’d forgotten that I even owned it.

This made me take a good hard look at my use of information products – and how I can make the most of them, rather than collect them as something to get to in the future.

Here are my thoughts. I’d love to hear your own tips in the comments, too.

Step 1: Buy Carefully

Well, it may be a bit late to tell you this one, if you have a stack of books and manuals and recordings all waiting for your attention. But something I’m going to pay more attention to in future is buying carefully.

That means:

• Recognising that my time is worth considerably more than a few extra bucks. If I can pay $20 to get high-quality information in an easily digestable and actionable format, that’s a lot better than bookmarking a ton of web pages that’ll take me a whole day to sort through, or buying a $5 ebook which is mostly fluff.
• Focusing on how I learn best. I don’t like listening to audio; I much prefer to read. That means I tend to buy ebooks or written course materials, not seminar-style audio content. It doesn’t matter how awesome the material is, I’m just not going to get round to using it.
• Checking out reviews before buying. Unless I already know the author, I always look at Amazon reviews before buying a book, or fellow blogger’s opinions on an ebook. In the past, I’ve bought some books which really didn’t work for me – and I can save both time and money by checking whether people like me, in my situation, got a lot out of that particular product.
• Using what I already have first. I’ve got a bit of a tendency to buy more books and more information. There’s always something new, after all. What I’ve realised over the past few weeks is that I need to focus on making good use of what I already have – and once I’ve used it fully, then I can think about what to buy next.

Step 2: Do Something Practical

You might have books on anything from gardening to knitting to starting a small business. If those books have languished unread on the shelf for months, is it because you’re not doing that particular thing?

I think it took me about a year from buying a knitting book to actually buying some wool and needles and making a scarf…

Recently, I dug back into some informational resources (How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook and The Sticky eBook Formula) because, guess what, I’m actually working on an ebook. Those books are both packed with great content – but they focus on action, not on theory. They’re not study materials for some academic course: they’re practical guides. There wouldn’t be much point in me reading them unless I was actually serious about writing an ebook.

If you’ve got a bunch of resources on some particular topic, you bought those because you wanted to take action. You were planning on taking up a new hobby, or improving your business, or learning a new skill. Rather than telling yourself “I should get round to reading those”, focus on what you’re going to do – which makes that information much more meaningful.

Step 3: Schedule in Learning

When you’re in the throes of doing something, it can be hard to step back and take the time to learn. You’ll end up telling yourself that it’s much more efficient to keep taking action, and that you’d be far better spending an hour getting your new website set up than just reading about website setups.

In the long-run, though, you’ll be much more effective if you use the information which you have. You’ll avoid making beginners’ mistakes, you’ll come up with new ideas, and you might discover a whole new angles which you’d never have otherwise come across.

You really don’t want to learn everything the hard way, losing money and time, only to find that the solutions were sitting in an unread ebook on your computer all along.

Finding time to learn could mean:

• Spending 20 minutes reading at the start of each day. (This solves the putting-it-off-indefinitely problem)
• Picking your “slump” time of day to read or listen to audio – I often turn to my information resources when my concentration dips at around 4pm, because I’ve got enough energy to learn but I’m too tired to write much.
• Scheduling in a couple of hours once or twice a week to really dig deep into the information.
• Taking a whole weekend as a specific “learning” time – treat it like a seminar or course, and put together your own timetable.

Step 4: Take it Seriously

If you’ve been on any form of academic or vocational course recently, you’ll have found the time to sit and listen to lectures, to take notes, and to read any materials necessary. You had deadlines and specific times to be in particular places, and you managed it.

When there’s no-one convening a class or delivering a panel, you’ve got to have a lot more self-motivation. For me, this comes from having an end in mind: I’m not just learning for the sake of learning, I’m constantly thinking about how to apply what I’m reading to what I want to do.

Learning can often feel like a waste of time. It’s not. Sitting and reading a book doesn’t necessarily look productive … but it can be a life-changing experience.

If you’re going to make the most of the information which you have, you need to get serious about it. Remind yourself why it matters. Remember that, in almost every area of your life, you need a balance between learning and doing. Give yourself deadlines if necessary, or set rigid not-to-be-ignored timeslots in your diary.

Take your commitment to learning as seriously as if you were paying for a college course on it. No, your money isn’t on the line. But your happiness and success might well be.

I’m taking my learning more seriously at the moment – but I’m aware I’ve still got some way to go! If you’ve got any great tips for making good use of information (whether it’s free or paid for, written, audio or live), then do chime in below…