Information Overload and 5 Coping Strategies

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What do all academics have in common? They are exhausted, suffering from information overload, stressed by juggling a plethora of differing responsibilities from teaching, administration, research, writing, to service work. It surprises people outside academia to know that full-time academics work as many hours as they do in a typical work week, and often far more. Class time, the part other people see is only the tip of the iceberg.

As many people are returning to school, let’s remember how the sense of being overwhelmed affects all of us. Feeling overwhelmed is not new to human history, but the amazing amount of accessible information is new.

I am certainly not immune from this issue myself. Every time I sit down to write anything, I find myself Googling first to see what ideas pop up.

Here’s the problem: with 1.2 trillion searches a year, and roughly 3 billion per day, anything you look up can return hundreds and hundreds of answers. And that does not mean the information is useful. There are plenty of hits that do not give us the answers we are searching for.

No wonder many of us feel like we are drowning in information.

Remember Marshall McLuhan (Canadian communications theorist, educator, writer and social reformer, 1911-1980)? His most famous maxim was “the medium is the message”. Way back in 1967 on CBC radio he said: “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with”. It’s truer than ever before.

One of my favorite sayings is, “Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.”

How do you filter this information to find the wisdom or even what you really need?

In his newest book A Field Guide to Lies (2016), Daniel Levitin looks at why a filtering process is so important and how to use critical thinking to work through statistical information and faulty arguments. He uses the term “infoliteracy” to demonstrate that there are hierarchies of source information, something academics have been trying to help students understand forever.

Academics stock in trade is information. They are all about filtering the data and helping the rest of us make sense of it. Granted, academics get accused of being out of touch in the ivory tower, but the truth is that research starting in universities does often make a difference when it gets out into the world. There are many concrete examples of scientific products begun in academic laboratories, to social science data used to make policy decisions.

Academics cannot help the rest of us, or get serious intellectual work done, when they feel overwhelmed by both information and workload, struggling to get by from day to day, weighted down by all their competing responsibilities. Not to mention that they can lose the excitement that brought them into this kind of intellectual work in the first place or the sense of fun and accomplishment great teachers have knowing they have made an impact in the lives of their students.

So, what is to be done? Here are five strategies for coping with the information overload that can help both the aspiring academic and the rest of us:

1.Start with knowing where your information is coming from and whether it is reliable enough to use or keep.

2.Decide what you can ignore and delete it to free up your mind. It’s impossible to stay on top of everything. Recognize that if something is really important, you will find it, or it will find you, again.

3.Turn off “mass distractions” when you have serious thinking work to do. Shut down email, social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), your telephone, your internet browser or anything else not absolutely necessary for your project. If you need to use the web for research, limit the amount of time you will devote to chasing down rabbit trails.

If you need a reason to shut off your distractions, consider this: Twitter produced over 7 billion tweets by 2009, more than the number of people then living on the planet, just three years from its founding. Today, on average, around 6,000 tweets go out every single second, 200 billion tweets per year. Just let it go!

4.“Outsource your brain” whenever possible. Automate email response when you are not available; turn over anything you can delegate to other people; set up auto alerts for items that you particularly want to know about. For instance, use browser “feeds” for information or articles based on a particular phrase, like “medicine using virtual reality.”

5.Skim what you have left before deciding which item you need to prioritize for action (finishing a report, reading an article, grading papers, etc.) Then act on the highest priority. Pay attention to your own circadian rhythms, and act when you have the most energy, whether that is early morning, late afternoon, or the middle of the night. But do act.

Maybe, if we can all remind ourselves that every one of us is dealing with huge information overload on a daily basis, we can allow ourselves to be just a little bit imperfect. Some things will fall through the cracks as we eliminate what we can to decrease overload. But some things will be a whole lot better for filtering all the incoming data.

If you’re looking for help dealing with overwhelm and information overload, sign up for your FREE 30-minute coaching consult. We can work together to come up with long strategies for managing your workload.