Smart Passive Income

Content Cacophony and How to Filter the Noise

There’s a lot of great content being produced in the world right now to help us move forward with our online businesses. For many of us, it’s actually too much.

Unless you have a filter in place you’ll be stuck reading, listening and watching more than you’re actually doing.

One method I learned a few years back that has helped me tremendously is something called just-in-time learning, which I first heard about from my good friend Jeremy over at Internet Business Mastery.

JITL is not about completely avoiding everything that is out there – because there is a lot of great content being produced that we don’t want to miss – and you shouldn’t. Rather, it’s about taking that post, podcast or video and storing it away in an organized place so that when it’s time to actually take action on things related to that content, you’ll have it ready for consumption and implementation, and you can easily find it.

Until that content can help you complete the next task or project you’re focusing on, don’t consume it.

This might sound funny coming from a person who produces a blog post every Monday, a podcast episode every Wednesday, and a video each Friday, along side a 5-day per week Q&A podcast at AskPat, but I also know that each one of those pieces of content isn’t for everyone at the same time.

Personally, I read one or two blog posts a week (again, related to the task(s) I want to complete), and one or two podcast episodes – and that’s it.

You may have your own preferred tools for implementing the JITL strategy. Bookmarking into different categories is the minimum. Maybe you begin a spreadsheet with all of the links and topics. For me, it’s a combination of Evernote, and Evernote Web Clipper (a browser extension), and sometimes SoundGecko if it’s written content with not a ton of images that I can listen to on the go.

I schedule certain times during my work hours specifically for being on social media and looking for content around the web that’s useful, and if I come across anything that seems like it may help me in the future, I clip it into Evernote and categorize it for later.

Hopefully this helps some of you as much as it has helped me with filtering all of the noise out there.

To finish off, I’d like to re-post one of my most popular and most commented posts here on SPI. It’s only 100 words long, and goes perfectly with this quick-hit post. It’s already March, and many of you (and I) need to read this because we’re busy, but we may not be busy doing the right things:

Finding success is all about taking action.

You can read all you want, but nothing will happen until you execute.

That is why today, I’m cutting this post short. Instead of reading my content, I want you to do something instead – right now. Do something for your blog, business or life that will get you moving forward and help you reach your goals.

All I ask is that you leave a comment of what you’re about to do (sort of like a pledge), and let’s see how much we can all get done today.

Sound good? Okay, let’s hear it…

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