Too much information

Are you feeling overwhelmed with the amount of information coming in every day, all the emails, presentations, phone calls, text messages and attachments? You're not alone. It's now a big problem in workplaces. Photo: Patrick Cummins

Concern about information overload has become one of the key issues of our time. Books are being digitised, newspapers and magazines are now available online and we now have an endless stream of blog postings, Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. Last year, a LexisNexis survey of workers around the world found that people are now driven to breaking point with the amount of data flooding workplaces.

As Schumpeter says in The Economist, it has become one of the irritations of modern life. “There are e-mails to answer, virtual friends to pester, YouTube videos to watch and, back in the physical world, meetings to attend, papers to shuffle and spouses to appease. A survey by Reuters once found that two-thirds of managers believe that the data deluge has made their jobs less satisfying or hurt their personal relationships. One-third think that it has damaged their health. Another survey suggests that most managers think most of the information they receive is useless.”

The problem, he says, is that it’s not a simple question of willpower where we turn off our mobile phones and occasionally shut down the Internet. Some of us are addicted to it and in any case, some bosses get shirty if you’re not available at any time. As he says, most companies are better at giving employees access to the information superhighway than at teaching them how to drive.

On the other hand, there is nothing new in this. Information overload has always been an issue, even in pre-digital days. Indeed, it goes right back in time. As it’s written in the book of Ecclesiastes, of making many books there is no end. Or as the Roman philosopher Seneca put it, the abundance of books is distraction.  In the Harvard Business Review, historian Ann Blair says that the issue became more widespread in the 15th century with the printing press. She says that the overload we experience today where a simple Google search can throw up millions of answers in a fraction of a second is “the result of the efforts of generations of accumulation”.

Still, there is more of a problem with the dizzying increase in the amount of information. As reported here, a new study by Dr Martin Hilbert from the University of Southern California and Dr Priscila Lopez of the Open University of Catalonia found that global storage capacity doubles about every three years and four months and that on average, each person in the world communicated the equivalent of six newspapers every day using two-way technologies like telephones and even more information was sent through broadcast technology. The amount of data was equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.

There are some who say the information tsunami is bad for us. In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr says the Internet and information overload is rewiring our brains. “Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet-ski. What we are experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilisation; we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”

Carr's book takes us through mountains of academic and consulting research to support his point. One study that examined the reading habits of 6000 young people who grew up with the internet found that they did not read a page from left to right, or from top to bottom, but instead skipped around, scanning for bits of pertinent information. So much information, but we can’t take it all in.

So how do we deal with it?

The consultants at McKinsey suggest more self-discipline but that’s easier said than done. A lot of people need that hit. Chris Erikson in the New York Post suggests something similar: step back, stop multi tasking and be smarter about emails . That would mean considering whether every addressee needs your reply, manage your settings by eliminating pop-up message notifications, or icons that display how many e-mails are waiting to be read and take time out from your mobile phone and computer.

That’s all easier said than done. And besides, self-discipline can backfire when people, especially your boss, are expecting you to respond all the time.

Writing in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow says we shouldn't worry too much about it. Just relax. If you overlook or ignore something in your inbox, RSS reader, or other feed, it won’t disappear forever. The faster your feeds get, the more the good stuff gets repeated. It will come back again and you will get another chance to read it.

How should we handle information overload? How do you deal with it?