Leadership Journal

Pity your poor mail carriers. Their shoulders must burn under the mailbag strap as they haul each day's mail to your desk. On a recent day, chosen at random, my mail drop included:

• A brochure promising (for only $1,495) an "intensive, hands-on workshop" from which you "go back to your office with a complete solution-oriented plan."

• A four-page flyer (see the metallic inks shine!) pointing me to a Web site that will give me "innovation, perspective, and impact."

• A packet of six book reviews, which left me feeling vaguely guilty about all the great books I should be reading but haven't read and probably won't. (About this time, a whiny little voice whispered in my ear, "And you call yourself a leader?")

I dropped the mail and booted up my laptop — and found seventeen e-mails in my inbox.

Even to live in our Age of Information is hard; to lead in our Age of Information is even harder. How can you keep up? Learn what's important? Filter out what's not? Grow as a person? Get things done?

I'm writing an article for Leadership Journal that explains three critical skills for finding only the information you most need — and how to get results from that. I'll share from that article later this year.

But in this installment I want to focus on a different aspect of leading in an age of information overload. It may surprise you.

For spiritual leaders, it's important to recognize that information must not only be managed, but also dethroned. At least one day a week, we must rest from gathering information just as the ancient Israelites rested from gathering wood. We must still our racing minds and rest our information-soaked souls. By so doing, we declare that humans cannot live by information alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

In Tabletalk (November 2000), commentator Ken Myers wisely writes: " … we should regularly practice media fasts: days or weeks during which we reduce the flood of information we receive to the merest trickle. Not only will such a practice enable us to set our knowledge in perspective, it also will help us recognize the love/hate relationship we have with information overload. We say we are frustrated by having so much to respond to, but we still carry cell-phones everywhere and check our e-mail every 10 minutes. It makes us feel important to be so busy. Media fasts should help us become more honest about our motivations."

If we read at all during a media fast, we limit ourselves to something that nourishes the soul — slowly, meditatively.

In the presence of God, we really must lose our insecurity about knowing everything, our anxiety about not being able to keep up. In God's presence, we develop the peaceful spirit that is of such value in his sight, the quiet wisdom that orders knowledge. Jack Trout, in The Power of Simplicity, quotes a scholar from George Mason University that today, " … the comparative advantage shifts from those with information glut to those with ...