Information overload is nothing new. Ralph Waldo Emerson, contemplating the Boston public library, lamented man’s ability to read and keep up with the glut of books: ‘Should he read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must die in the first alcoves.’
In the 1980s, Jeremy Weisner described his educational experience this way: ‘Getting an education is like taking a drink from a fire hose.’
These days, we’re washed away by a flood of news and information Emerson or even Weisner couldn’t have imagined. Google, streaming video, tweets, texts, emails, the endless links and posts on Facebook, those viral videos we can’t help but click, the phone photos and videos we share… phew.
But while we’re drowning in the flood, we lose our ability to evaluate and make decisions- to tell what’s real and what’s fake. It’s hard to breathe underwater.
Blame the like button. Once, much of the information we took in was filtered, judged, analyzed. And we trusted the curators- the journalists, editors, and authors who did the work. Nowadays things are different- and according to a recent Nature paper[3], in networks like Facebook and Twitter, accurate and inaccurate reporting have an equal chance of success, because of a tendency to view something as higher quality because it’s shared frequently. “The wisdom of the crowd’ isn’t always true.
If social media was just about cat videos, the accuracy might not be an issue. But according to a Pew Research Center study[4], the majority of us get some of our news on social media, and roughly one in five does so often- and the percentages are increasing.
Nor is traditional mainstream media as immune from this problem as it once was. According to Eugenia Siapera, who lectures on new media and journalism at Dublin City and Aristotle universities, “In my view, as mainstream news organizations cut more and more staff, they need to rely on other sources; mostly, these are news agencies, but often they are alternative news sites. Secondly, a prime journalistic concern is to feel the pulse of the public – to do this, they often turn to alternative media if only to acquire a different kind of understanding. A third means of influence is a more aesthetic one, as the kind of personalized, informal, experience-based style of writing is sometimes replicated in mainstream media.”
In other words, as Daniel Levitin of McGill University puts it, “On a daily basis, the onslaught of information is preventing us from being evidence-based decision-makers, at our own peril.”[5]
Think of it this way: all of this is more information than the brain is configured to handle. The conscious mind can pay attention to three, maybe four, things at once. “If you get much beyond that, you begin to exercise poorer judgment, you lose track of things and you lose your focus,” Levitin says.[1]
Information overload also paralyzes us into a state of inaction, and if we don’t use the information that we’re learning immediately, we lose up to 75% of that information from our memories and brains, making all of the information we’re taking in nearly useless.6]
There are plenty of reasons why we should all find ways to cope with information overload. How do we go about it?
It helps to have a system. Elizabeth Harrin suggests the following approach[8]:
Identify the sources. Categorize where your data is coming from. This will probably involve email, IM, social media feeds, websites, blogs and video such as YouTube, magazines, books, and television or streaming. It may involve work-related data such as reports, ERP software, and such.
Filter the information. This requires deciding which data is significant, how significant, and how soon you need to process it. Set up a system to deal with each source. For example, create email rules to push email to separate folders to review. If your email reader doesn’t help you, take a look at apps like SaneBox [9]. File magazines for reading in downtime such as during your lunch break.
Make time to review the data. This is basically scheduling your data use. For example, you might review emails first thing in the morning, right after lunch, and just before you leave the office. You might schedule your offline reading during lunch or your commute. One advantage of scheduling this way is that it groups similar tasks- such as reviewing emails- together. It also separates ‘work time’ from time processing information.
Act on it or delete it. This is sometimes called the F.A.S.T. rule: File, Act, Suspend, or Trash. Each document you process should be ‘once and done’. Deal with it now, if you can; if it’s going to take more than a few minutes to do add it as a task or suspend to another time. Either file or trash the document. Delete everything you can. An email that remains in your in-basket or a magazine article you’ve already read is an invitation to distraction.
Turn it off. Take a second look at the information you’re receiving. Do you need it? Is it adding value? If not, turn it off. Un-subscribe, ask to be removed from copy lists, or set email rules to move to trash. Think of it this way: every piece of information you process is taking precious seconds of your life you’ll never get back. Spend only as much time on information as it’s worth.
Try to improve the quality of the information you follow. Recognize fake news and quit paying attention to it. Don’t strike at clickbait. The warning sign is a headline that entices you to click on a hyperlink or read an article. Do you really want to know the details of ‘Air Force reprimands three airmen over puppet video’? A lot of clickbait is advertising; use features like Facebook’s ‘Hide ad’ feature to turn it off. Avoid appeals to emotion, teasers (’A schoolgirl gave her lunch to a homeless man. What he did next will leave you in tears!’), celebrity gossip, anything that’s a slide show. Smart people work hard to get you to click on their links, but you’re smart too- too smart to fall for it.
Limit your time on Facebook and Twitter. Turn off non-critical alerts- think of them as Pavlovian bells.
When you actively manage your information and say no to overload, you’re saying it’s your time. Don’t waste it.
[1] The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, Plume, 2014
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen, Penguin, 2001
[2] One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, Robert Maurer, Ph.D., Workman Publishing, 2004
[3] Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information, Qiu, Oliveira, Shirazi, Flammini, & Menczer, Nature Human Behavior Letters, Vol. 1, June 2017
[4] http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/apr/10/alternative-news-cycle-mainstream-platforms
[6] https://www.psychotactics.com/art-retain-learning/
[7] https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2017/0627/How-information-overload-helps-spread-fake-news
[8] https://www.imindq.com/blog/5-steps-for-dealing-with-information-overload
[9] https://www.sanebox.com/