One of the most crippling aspects of working online is information overload. It could come from being tied to your email, having to make decisions with to much information to sort through, or even being tied in to your friends on social networking sites. What ever the reason it’s the thing that keeps us all from achieving everything that we’d like to online.

If you’re in this situation it might not even be obvious just how bad of shape your in. That is until you realize that your online business is not paying what you thought it would. You might have to postpone that early retirement you were hoping the internet lifestyle would afford. Or worse still, go back to your day job just to make ends meet. If this is the case you need to figure out how to eliminate information overload, and quick.

One of the most effective ways to get started doing so is to, stop information overload from happening in the first place. Information overload is the massive amount of distractions coming in to you on a daily basis that paralysis’s your ability to get any work done.

If you’re like me you’ve had the bad habit of clicking on your email too many times a day, keeping tabs on what everyone else is doing, reading unnecessary things, doing unproductive activities and so on. One of the best ways to stop the online interrupters is to first take a look at your availability.

Are you constantly being distracted by the phone, email and social networking sites? These can all quickly eat up your productive hours and at the same time look deceptively like real work. Or, at least make you feel like you’re doing something. In reality, what you are doing is really just pretending to be busy and not really doing the critical actions that will create long term results.

It’s been said by Vilfredo Pareto almost one hundred years ago that only 20% of your actions will create 80% of your results. Are you doing the critical tasks required to actually get the 80% of results. Or instead are you staying busy to avoid the hard actions you need to do to get results?

Find out how the best selling author of the 4 hour work week, Timothy Ferriss recommends you overcome information overload and get more done online and in your life.(The audio is really low on this video, so you may have to turn up your speakers.)

Ways to control information overload include:

• Define what you should be doing with your time.
• Eliminate unnecessary tasks.
• Only read information that you will use in the immediate future.
• Stop the incoming flow of non critical information. Including news, talk radio, phone, social networking, emails.
• Stop being just efficient at doing non-critical tasks. So what if you can check your email in 30 seconds. Doing unimportant things well does not make a task important.
• Focus on the actions that get results early. Getting some success under your belt early in the day will fuel your productivity.
• Develop an information management strategy that is tailored to your needs.
• After you have researched an opportunity or subject, trust yourself when it comes to making the right decisions.

For another funny video about the 80/20 rule check out this post about getting things done online and Pareto’s law.