INFORMATION OVERLOAD— it’s not real and that’s why you can end it.
I hear many people say they feel overburdened with ‘information overload’. My impression is this experience is often seen as something outside of one’s control, something that is done to us by others or some algorithm or by life itself; in other words, that you cannot do something about it. I want to share an insight with you that both reveals that ‘information overload’ is, in most cases*, not the actual problem and which also helps you get rid of this troubling experience for good.
So, here’s the insight: information is not a thing, but an event.
“How does this help?!”, you may ask. It helps, by making clear that the elements of this experience of ‘too much’ are not things, but events in our mind. With events I mean interpretations and conclusions such as “interesting!“, “Oh, how sad!“, “I should be careful with this…“, “Maybe we can use this for our project!“, “This threatens my plan…“, “Hm, this leads me to question…” and so on.
This is what information is, or as Gregory Bateson put it concisely: “Information is a difference that makes a difference.“
So, are those emails in your inbox and the endless chat messages in your various apps information? No. They are just messages or data. It actually doesn’t matter how you call them; but it is very helpful to keep things — which you can store, change or get rid of — separate from events — which you cannot store or undo and, more importantly here: which are created in you.
Keeping information and data apart from each other allows you to see more clearly your own influence on and freedom in the ‘too much’-experience. You can choose to not pay attention to whole sets of categories of messages and data. If you do, those messages will not burden you anymore. Your brain does that all the time for you, with countless physical stimuli that are not important to your current goal — say, arriving at the meeting in time. It can do that for irrelevant messages and news as well!
The reason the brain does not filter with lightning speed through irrelevant data is when you are not clear about what is important to you and what is not. So, this is the actual problem with ‘information overload’: not personally being clear about what is important. Then we busy ourselves trying to process all the ‘data’. While in reality we are often lacking information (=news that make a relevant difference for us), since we have spent our time and moments of insight otherwise.
What can be done about it? I personally regularly dedicate time to sort through the topics and work that are important to me and make a conscious decision to only give attention to those things. Then, when I read news and messages I don’t feel the need to process it all, only that what matters and I can identify that easily.
Judging from my observations in consulting and coaching, for many people it would amount to nothing short of a game-changer if they would dedicate 20min each day to becoming clear about their big picture and what is now important. Simply writing down all that is on your mind and then choosing a maximum of 2–3 items to focus on is one good way to do it. The method is not really important, rather that one creates clarity for the day or whatever timeframe.
More general decisions about what to pay attention to and what not take some more time than that to figure out, but also that is worth it. Actually, especially those broader decisions (e.g. whether or not to generally engage in gossip or other negative discussions) can unburden you from vast amounts of ‘data’ to process.
*Of course, there are situations in which important developments and news about them become overwhelming, such as in emergency or unbalanced work/life situations. Here the term information overflow might be fitting and but that is either rarely the case or a sign for necessary changes.
PS: credit goes especially to Gerhard Wohland, who made me aware of the central distinction presented in this article.
