How to deal with information overload
My friend cancelled our dinner plans last night because she was so tired. I was too exhausted to be disappointed. It’s an all too common experience. So what makes us so exhausted?
There’s a lot going on, but Johann Hari’s Stolen focus helped me see the role of information overload. Hari points out that more and more information is pushed at us every day:
· 1986: the equivalent of forty 85-page newspapers
· 2007: 174 newspapers
· Now: unknown but likely more.
Hari quotes Sune Lehmann who likens our situation to drinking from a fire hose.
That image makes sense of my experience. I feel like I’m choking on the water from that fire hose all day every day, as my devices drown me in more and more new information.
I also make the problem worse by seeking out lots of additional information whenever I need to make a decision. To bake soda bread, I don’t use a cookbook. Instead, I google ‘soda bread’, which generates 173,000,000 results. So now I have to decide which recipe to use. Is it better to use buttermilk or regular milk, butter or oil? Why do some recipes include eggs when others don’t? Do I want caraway seeds or raisins? What about nuts? Do I want it to be moist? Do I care if the recipe is authentic? What does authenticity means in this context anyway?
Thirty minutes later, I’m still online and my head is spinning. The soda bread could have been in the oven by now.
In “Tyranny of choice,” Barry Schwartz calls people like me “maximizers.” We want to pick the best option, so we spend too much time and effort doing comparison shopping. But then, when we finally make a selection, we end up less happy with what we picked.
For some projects, of course, comparison shopping is crucial. But for trivial life decisions, like soda bread, it’s not. So I tell myself sternly to pick something. Just use the first recipe in the Google search. I’m sure it’s fine!
But the problem is that I’m actually not sure. There are some crummy recipes out there! I know myself well enough to realize that I’ll find it impossible not to compare a few of those 173,000,000 recipes. We maximizers are bound to exhaust ourselves online, encouraging the firehose of the internet to flood us with an infinite supply of information.
And I also know that whenever people get exhausted and overwhelmed, we get worse at shutting out useless information. This means that as the infinite number of recipes online exhausts me, I’ll become even less capable of picking one. Plus the exhaustion from my silly soda bread struggles will leave me less capable of making other decisions, and some of them may actually matter.
So I’m going for a new strategy. When I prepare to bake, I’m shutting the internet fire hose off altogether, using my trusted Freedom app (the best invention since the mute button!). And I’ll pull my old cookbooks out and use one of the recipes in there.
