longer view, what truly meaningful subject could we dedicate our
mental energy to?
In her diary in 1942, Dorothy Day, the Catholic nun and social
activist, admonished herself much the same. “Turn off your radio,”
she wrote, “put away your daily paper. Read one review of events and
spend time reading.” Books, spend time reading books—that’s what
she meant. Books full of wisdom.
Though this too can be overdone.
The verse from John Ferriar:
What wild desires, what restless torments seize
The hapless man, who feels the book-disease.The point is, it’s very difficult to think or act clearly (to say
nothing of being happy) when we are drowning in information. It’s
why lawyers attempt to bury the other side in paper. It’s why
intelligence operatives flood the enemy with propaganda, so they’ll
lose the scent of the truth. It’s not a coincidence that the goal of these
tactics is casually referred to as analysis paralysis.
Yet we do this to ourselves!
A century and a half after Napoleon, another great general and,
later, head of state, Dwight D. Eisenhower, struggled to manage the
torrent of facts and fiction that was thrown at him. His solution was
strict adherence to the chain of command when it came to
information. No one was to hand him unopened mail, no one was to
just throw half-explored problems at him. Too much depended on
the stillness within that he needed to operate to allow such
haphazard information flow. One of his innovations was to organize
information and problems into what’s now called the “Eisenhower
Box,” a matrix that orders our priorities by their ratio of urgency and
importance.
Much that was happening in the world or on the job, Eisenhower
found, was urgent but not important. Meanwhile, most of what was
truly important was not remotely time-sensitive. Categorizing his
inputs helped him organize his staff around what was important
versus what seemed urgent, allowed them to be strategic rather than