This time I thought it would be nice to speak in public in English for the very first time. Honestly, I’m not very used to it, because I’ve always given lectures and different kinds of speeches in Finnish. So yeah, this is my first time. And I thought it would be nice to talk about my book. In English, the title is From Information Overload to Clarity, which I wrote last year—2024.

It’s all about information overload and how you can manage it, how you can take some control of everything that’s constantly coming at you—messages, knowledge, bits of information. In the first chapters I talk about chaos theory, which is very interesting because it’s quite close to this idea of information overload. It’s full of questions about what’s happening around us, but at the same time it shows possibilities for taking control. Sometimes there’s a big mess—like turbulence when you’re flying in an airplane. In the same way, in the information environment, there’s turbulence and mess, and you have to find ways to take control.

In general, humanity is rushing by. People live in the fast lane, constantly moving, and I wanted to give some advice on how you can manage information—what the real problem is in today’s society, in the internet world, with AI, and with the endless stream of incoming messages. How do you handle all that, along with historical things—your “calories” or collections? For example, everyone has their own memory collections: photo albums, videos, smartphone pictures, messages, the websites they’ve visited. Everything is a piece of knowledge, a piece of information. And the question is: how do you manage it? How do you take control? That’s the big issue in today’s life.

If you look at the bigger picture, it’s also an economic issue. Organizations face the same challenges: they have too much information, too many possibilities. There’s competition between companies, between nations, and between markets. You need innovation, and you need strong action to handle knowledge. This leads to discussions about leadership—how knowledge should be managed so that it cultivates new ideas and creates opportunities.

One of the practical tools I suggest—and which I’ve used personally and as an entrepreneur—is mind maps. In my book, I include a lot of details about how to use them in practice. They’re a powerful method for structuring knowledge and information. They let you see the whole picture. I’ve been using mind maps for over 20 years. Back when I was finishing university, they were quite new, but I got my best results when using them. I don’t know if it was just me or my way of thinking, but I gained so many benefits that I kept using them later. I’ve used them for projects, for learning, and for many other things.

I’ve also studied how to handle information between different programs, how to gather large projects into mind maps, and how to connect them with websites. And I started to think—this should be done more in corporations and organizations. I haven’t seen mind maps used very much, for example in decision-making for big construction projects or other large-scale situations.

Later, I also studied how to visualize data—how to present it in a way that supports decision-making. This brought me to the idea of noise, from Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues’ book. In decision-making, “noise” means all the unclear or irrelevant things that disturb the important knowledge. And I believe mind maps are one way to reduce that noise. Of course, other methods of visualizing data also help reduce it.

Another concept I bring up in my book is the second brain. This is a method, from Tiago Forte and others, for organizing data—how you collect it, manage it, and structure it into different useful paths.

Overall, my book’s message is that when you take control of your information flows, you gain rational decision-making, better use of your data, and better ways of handling different situations. You can become the “boss” of your own reality. And in general, if people take control of their information, I believe they’ll make better decisions for all of us.

Of course, AI will keep bringing new data and new ways to handle it. But in the end, the people who make decisions in organizations still play a very important role in innovation, in moving forward, in building a better and happier future.

I think people must take control of their own reality—by taking control of information overload in today’s society. And in this book, I share my personal advice on how to do that.

Thank you.

P.S. The book is currently in a self-produced phase, and I make copies according to demand. If needed, I can also translate it into English later on.