Information Overload

??????????????????: Do I have your attention? Good, because you certainly don’t. I’m sure I lost mine on a random Youtube video about some esoteric battle in ancient mesopotamia. Precisely when I should have been doing the grocery order. There’s just too much information out here for us to consume. And in the consumption of it I’ve lost all of my critical thinking faculties. Which is why I’m sitting on the sofa way past my bedtime, scrolling through a thread about cats…hypothetically.

Information overload is ubiquitous. In fact in this day and age I'm tempted to say it might just be our default. When we're exposed to an excessive amount of information our brain undergoes difficulty in processing, understanding and making decisions. By living in the information era, we oft live in an era of anxiety as a result.?

"A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 17th century." - Richard Saul Wurman?

Our brains are wonderful, limited things that construct reality around us through the information we take in. And these limitations are not going to change any time soon. As Miller discovered, our working memory does not get better, regardless of how much we might try to improve it. We can build our schemas such that we reduce the load on our working memory (WM), but we won't get more than 7 items in the WM at a time no matter what we do (I have my questions about what an item is exactly though...). Our tech may evolve to mitigate our biological 'shortcomings', but evolution, as Darwin defines, is likely to take us a couple more million years. Ain't nobody got time for that!

The proliferation of information was inevitable with the ease of access technology afforded us. Starting with the invention of language to let each other know what we were thinking, through the printing press so that we may influence the generations yet to come, and currently to the world wide web in our pockets addicting us to the immediacy of information around the world.?

So given how often we are on our phones doom scrolling social media, listening to podcasts, watching shorts as well as working full time jobs, looking after children, keeping up with friends in the tech-less spaces. We're now constantly overstimulating our dopamine pathways, kneecapping our memory consolidation by overworking our working memory and making poor decisions by fatiguing our prefrontal cortex and inhibiting its capacity to distinguish relevant and irrelevant data.?

Who benefits from such a system? I don't believe there are many malicious actors in this world of ours. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that it's our systems that propagate undesired outcomes. Our economic system currently encourages companies to focus on growth, and allows the free market to 'decide' what it is that they want to grow by voting with their wallets. Only our reality has changed. We no longer vote with our wallets. I'm certainly not paying for the sites I get my information from. We're voting with our attention.?

You may argue that our attention leads to our wallets, so isn't this just the same system but with extra steps? Yes, but those extra steps add nuances that completely change how we interact with companies. In the previous iteration we used to be advertised to, but a lot of the time we used our personal, in real life networks to find out about what was available to us. The slow roll out of information allowed us to cognizantly make a decision on our purchases. Admittedly we didn't have as many options available to us at this point, but precisely because of this we actually considered more options than we do now. The information load was manageable.?

The way our brains work, means that now our attention is so readily available and easily understood by others, it is becoming more and more difficult to control our own attention. Where as our wallets could only be accessed through a discerning mind, our attention is gathered as if turning on a faucet. And the water running through is information.?

So there's your doom and gloom fix.?

Now that I have your attention, let's work out how you can take it back.?

1. Time Blocking - Your calendar should be your to do list. And each item on your to do list should have a pomodoro assigned to it. And each pomodoro should be a physical timer that you set. Time is incredibly hard to account for, given that your perception of it varies. You need these measurements to even realise when your attention has been pilfered. And more importantly how long it was stolen for?
2. Boundaries - Your attention span is like a child. it will not grow into a wonderful and mature thing unless it is given boundaries to play within. You have to audit and curate your information faucets. Ask yourself, how does this thing benefit me and help me grow into the type of person I want to be? This question had me delete all social media off my phone...bar LinkedIn :(. Once you've chosen the faucets you'll allow at your sink, you then need to determine how 'open' you leave them i.e. I use a three down technique - scroll down three times when you sign into a digital source, then digest the information by scrolling upwards. That way there will be an 'end' to trigger you to get off the app.?
3. Define your dumb breaks - When are you going to just let your brain rest? Some people swear by meditation...I swear at it. Others prefer to do a mindless activity. Adult colouring books are really gaining in popularity for this reason. However you choose to dumb down, remember: Minimal information!

In a world where our attention is the new currency, how do you manage information overload? Share your experience!

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Timothy Lovatt - 2023 - Shut The Phone Up - Apple Podcasts

Alexandra Jones - 2019 - ‘I feel bombarded with to-dos': the hell of life admin – and how to get on top - The Guardian

Richard Saul Wurman - 1989 - Information Anxiety - Doubleday

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