Author of 'Thrive On Overload' Ross Dawson dropped in to 'Wake Up With Cheddar' to give us his expert tips on how we can all thrive and survive in a world where we are constantly being bombarded with information. Watch! 

How To Thrive In A World Of Information Overload

it seems like nowadays everyone can relate to being overworked, overwhelmed and overloaded and our next guest might have all the answers on how we can learn healthier habits that will also allow us to thrive and be happier. Is the author of thriving on overload ross. Dawson joins us here on wake up with cheddar ross. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. By the way, I actually should say good evening since you're zooming in all the way from Sydney Australia with us this morning, Good morning to you since it's good morning for you. Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you. So, we've got to start off by talking about this book. So how did you start out tackling the concept of being overloaded? Because that in and of itself seems pretty overwhelming. The reality is we live in a world of extraordinary information. You know, it's just that the life we live in, we live in a world of most information. So this has to be our skill. We need to develop the capabilities to deal with that to make sense of that to get value. So if we go to the default path of just immersing ourselves with information, we are going to become dumber, you know, it is going to deplete our brains, but we have the choice to approach it the right way so that we can thrive on overload to make it the superpower which drives value in our life in our careers. Alright, so your book tackles the five powers of success in a world of exponential information. So let's go through those five here. So the first power is purpose. We need to know why we deal with information at all in the first place. The second one is framing this is where we put together pieces. Information by itself isn't really valuable. It's only when we make the connections, when we build the frameworks that are the foundation for knowledge, the third one is filtering because there's far too much and we need to be able to tell the difference between what it is that gives us value and what it is that doesn't give us value. The fourth power is that of attention where we can direct our awareness to what it is that is useful to us and not let it get sucked down all the rabbit holes that big technology tries to pull this down. And the fifth one critically is synthesis which is pulling this all together so that we can see the whole we can bad things better and make better decisions. So those five powers taken together are the powers that enable us to thrive in the world of overload and great tips there. But I need you to break down the positive one because you say to build a positive relationship with information, you have to start with purpose. So that the first tip you said their purpose, what do you mean by that? Exactly? Well the first point is that we have a relationship with information just like we do with food or with money and a lot of people have a quite destructive relationship with information. So we need a positive 11 which enables us. So our purpose is tells us whether or not information is useful to us or not. So we can for example, choose to say, well, this is what I want to achieve in my life. These are the things that are going to help me develop my expertise or support my career. These are the things that will inspire me. And so once we know our purpose, what it is that is good for us, then we can say that information is good and that information probably doesn't serve me. And so this purpose, this idea of why we engage with information at all in the first place helps us to filter to discern, to take the information which is useful for us and leave the rest behind ross. We consume so much information, news, social media, everything. What tips do you have for monitoring what we consume on a daily basis here. So first point is that we need to have some diets or some budgets. So we have some budgets for our household finances that we should be spending too much. And so and same thing with our attention. So there's some things that are valuable for us. So if there's a good book there, we are studying something which is we are learning, we are developing our career. We could spend plenty of time on that, that's fine. But things which social media would suck us down these uh doom scrolling holes. We can give ourselves a budget might be alright, there's 15 minutes. I'm gonna look at news in the morning or in fact probably not first thing in the morning cause that gives it a negative state of mind. I said, alright, here's 15 minutes which I will use for news and I'm going to stop them and then later you might say well, alright, there's five minutes where I'll give myself time to scroll through social media and then I'm going to stop. So if we can give ourselves fixed periods of time, this is a budget and then after that we can make sure that we have something else which is good for us which is enables us which could be some inspiring information or things which we can learn from or things which can actually drive value in our lives. So we need to decide between the good information and just make sure that while we can indulge in celebrity news or a lot of the negative headlines that are out there so we can keep on top, we can keep that limited to a particular period of time set of time or use apps to be able to be focused and that's what it means, that we can be in a state of balance. Yeah, I love those time restrictions. There is perfect way for us to navigate through all of our things we have in our life. So thank you so much to ross Dawson, and of course, you can pick up his book, thriving on overload wherever books are so.