Book review: The Principle of Relevance

When the brain is overloaded with data, it tends to cut down on data gathering, jump to rapid conclusions, and respond to data immediately as they come, in an unconscious attempt to put an end to the data overload.

This is an observation made by Stefania Lucchetti, author of The Principle of Relevance. How true a statement this is!

Think of all the bits and pieces of data flying at you all day. Emails, phone calls, voice mail, Facebook, Twitter, the call of “Mom! Mom! Mom!”. All demanding our attention. Immediate attention! And we end up making uninformed decisions and wasting a whole whack of valuable time.

But is our immediate attention really required?

According to Stefania, no it is not, and I couldn’t agree with her more.

The Principle of Relevance is a guide for navigating through all the digital information that is thrown at us in at its forms. However, it is more than that. It is call to each of us to figure out what is really important to us so that we do not simply react, or the opposite, shut down from overload.

The other day, someone told me her husband said he would investigate a piece of furniture they were thinking of buying. He was going to surf the web. Surf it? He took a cruise around the world! He literally spent a full day Googling an armoire.

Was everything he read relevant to their purchase? No, of course not. Most of what he was looking for was likely too big, the wrong style, or way out their price range. But he got sucked into reading irrelevant information, because he had not gone through the exercise with the goal to only look at relevant information.

We all do it.

We give all our emails equal priority when deciding what to read. We answer emails we were carbon copied on, rather than treating cc’s as information only. We drop what we are doing when our boss tells us he needs something, instead of taking the time to have a discussion with him to determine if the new task is more relevant than the task we are working on.

It has gotten to a point that we are controlled by information rather than controlling information and using it to our advantage.

As Stefania points out, we can certainly claim to be efficient. “Hey, look at me? I responded to 100 emails today.” But, we sure are not effective. “Oh crap, I never actually delivered anything meaningful.”

Most of the discussion and tools in The Principle of Relevance are about how to perform our work and research effectively by establishing and sticking to what is relevant. However, I found the advice could easily be extrapolated to how we process information in general.

I took Stefania’s principles and tools and created a process for determining how to balance my work and family obligations each day. Heck, I even now meet my spiritual needs each day! All by taking the time every morning to determine what is relevant for the day.

If it ain’t relevant, I ain’t paying attention to it. … until if and when it becomes relevant.

And I’m telling you, I have accomplished so much in the past two weeks it is mind boggling. Yet I feel completely calm and energized.

To find out more about Stefania Lucchetti and The Principle of Relevance please visit: http://stefanialucchetti.com/

Silver & Grace Women love to share!

How much thought do you put to relevance as you deal with all the bits and bytes of information thrown at you each day? Tell us in the comment section below.

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