1 min read The Good Life

FOMI - Fear Of Missing Information

I don't know about you, but I increasingly feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of "useful information" that is thrown at us every day. No time in the world would suffice to ever read all the articles, books, and Twitter threads out there we deem interesting and worth reading.
FOMI - Fear Of Missing Information

I don't know about you, but I increasingly feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of "useful information" that is thrown at us every day. No time in the world would suffice to ever read all the articles, books, and Twitter threads out there we deem interesting and worth reading. And what about those webinars, YouTube videos and podcast episodes?

A lot of friends and colleagues I talk to feel the same way. But while it's overwhelming, we still continue to consume more and more. But why?

Fear of Missing Information (FOMI)

FOMI is this constant, pervasive fear that there is something slipping through the cracks, something we are missing, some little tidbit of information, knowledge or data that we might have gained if we just read one more article, listened to one more podcast episode.

And this haunts us.

It haunts us with this feeling that there is something valuable in our digital lives we are missing out on. This one nugget that will make our job easier or bring about an epiphany for the upcoming storyline of our presentation.

What to do about it: Write down your favorite problems

I do not have a solution to this recent phenomenon. But what I can highly recommend (and what helped me tremendously), is to write down 10-12 questions or 'favorite problems' you are currently trying to answer or solve in your life. For example:

  • How can I make cooking a daily part of my life?
  • How can I learn to write more effective copy?
  • How do I scale my company without loosing our current creativity and freedom?
  • How can I support the education of the next generation of marketers?
  • ...

Now for the next 2-3 weeks try to only read, listen or view content related to answering those specific questions. Discard the rest. I found that this is a great filter for discriminating what information is useful right now and what information I can safely ignore without this nagging fear of missing something vital.

Do you know this problem in your own life? How do you determine what's important or worth spending time on?

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