Happy Memorial Day! In this post, I'm going to talk a little more about personal information management and why having an information strategy is so important to designing the life that makes you happy.
Where do you start?
For the longest time, I lived my life following the formula that has been peddled to the American people since lord knows when. You know, the American dream, the white picket fence, the big house, the family, etc. It represents ambition and I've always tried to follow my ambitions. I did good in high school, got good grades and participated in extracurricular activities. Then, I went to get my bachelor's degree and graduated with a good GPA and manga cum laude.
I went to graduate school after that. I got good grades and a good GPA, and I got a job within three months of graduating. All of this took a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifices. Now, I am living in a different city in a different state, working a job I went to school for. I'm extremely blessed, I know, and I try not to take that for granted. I worked hard to get where I am.
And yet, I felt like I was missing something. In my pursuit for what I thought I should do, for that ambition, I sacrificed other things. Friendship and fun are just a couple. Once I was done with school, I realized I had no personal life outside of school. No hobbies and all of the interests I had were school-related. I knew I wanted things to feel different in my life but I had no idea where to start.
How did I change?
Well, I guess you can say it all started with a blog I began reading. Which led me to other blogs that inspired me to create hobbies and interests for myself and where I could meet like-minded people who wanted the same things that I did in life. Taking in all of this information led me to see what I wanted.
I set about making a strategy for myself to see what else I needed to learn about my hobbies before I began making decisions for integrating them into my life. For instance, I knew I wanted to write a book, but I needed confidence in myself that I could write. I created a strategy for how I wanted to learn to write. I knew I needed a space to practice and where I could get critiques. I knew I also needed it to be on my time, without too many deadlines, because I was working a full-time job and didn't have a ton of spare time.
Then, once I identified the information I needed, I began looking for it. Blogs are a great source of information and one blog led me to the Gotham Writers. One class in particular, called Jumpstart Your Writing, was about building confidence in writing. I immediately signed up for it and I've been writing ever since. I am now working on my first novel.
What is an information strategy?
An information strategy is a plan, a plan for identifying what you want, finding more information, and using that information to take action steps. It's also about building confidence in yourself. When you have more information about something, you feel more confident that you know what you're getting yourself into.
Don't underestimate the power of having an information strategy. By having one, we can know more about where we want to go in our lives. I'll be talking more about this in later posts.
Thank you for reading and see you next time :)
Melissa
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