Information Overload has reared its nasty little horns in our everyday life, and too often are we searching for material instead of using our time more valuably. How many times have you clenched your fists, thrown your arms into the sky, and shouted “WHERE THE $&@# IS IT!?” or at least thought about it? The inability to locate something — typically information — is one of the most common byproducts of information overload.
These instances can be minorly irritating or majorly stressful. In an attempt to track down an invoice this morning, I combed through my email, checked Dropbox, and eventually reached out to the vendor who directed me to an email from Quickbooks (duh), where I finally located the document.
Submitting a major work proposal before its deadline can be more stressful. It wasn’t because you procrastinated, but rather got stuck trying to find the different files needed, as some were located in your inbox and others in a poorly named folder on your company’s server. Thankfully, you got everything out in time, but the process was filled with anxiety.
Information overload is more than occasional annoyance — it impacts us far more often than we realize, and the negative effects are worse than we imagine due to the cumulative nature of it.
Information Overload
The internet has made it much easier to create and store content. In in two days, we now create the same amount of information created by humanity from dawn of civilization to 2003.
This explosion of content has a number of profound implications, but I’d like to highlight two in particular:
- Our brains are overloaded — we consume 74 GB of data/day!
Dr. Daniel Levitin, a professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University discusses information overload with Dr. Sanjay Gupta in a recent interview on CNN:
Constantly jumping from one task to another without actually getting anything done is a symptom of decision fatigue, and one that’s become all too common in the modern workplace. Then when the need to focus on high priority items arises, we lack the energy necessary to fully think through the decision making process.
What’s the cost of poor decision making at your job? For many, it’s the difference between winning or losing a new account, making or avoiding a poor hire, or investing your company’s time and resources in the right or wrong initiatives.
2) The average office worker wastes nearly 500 hours/year just tracking things down…
The information retrieval process has grown increasingly frustrating for many of us. My interview with Susan Gunelius, CEO of KeySplash Creative, author of Content Marketing for Dummies and 9 other books, explains how much time and money is wasted on this activity.
Some simple math shows that approximately 25% of our work lives are spent attempting to locate content:
Even if you’re 2X as efficient as the average person, you’re still spending an excessive amount of time on search and retrieval activities.
THERE IS HOPE…USE THESE 7 TIPS TO FIGHT INFORMATION OVERLOAD AND RECLAIM WASTED TIME
#1: IMPLEMENT A CLEAR SHARED FOLDER NAMING STRUCTURE… to help others find what they need:
Estimated Time Savings: 2 hours/month (save teammates more!)
Setting up a folder structure across teams or departments can be challenging. A specific methodology is required or inconsistency amongst individuals will perpetuate chaos.
Patrick Clapp, an Information Research Specialist at Harvard Business School, was good enough to speak with me and share a few practical nuggets of wisdom on how to do this in a way that doesn’t require a ton of time or reflection. He explained that in a project-oriented environment, the top-level folders should be identical to facilitate findability, discovery, and reuse-ability at a future date.
Every file structure does not need to be entirely the same throughout. As you get beyond the first layer of subfolders it makes sense to have a more project specific naming convention so you can find the specific files with greater ease.
Patrick advocates for organizing documents with a forward looking purpose. In order to be useful long term, the structure should allow you or a co worker to easily find a document six months from now.
Take fifteen minutes to agree to a shared folder naming structure at your next meeting to help Future You and teammates find what you need.
#2: CUT DOWN ON OPEN BROWSER TABS…. To free up cognitive space:
Estimated Time Savings: 1 hour/month
Blogger Lauren Moon explains why we have so many browser tabs open, and sums up many of us in her opening lines:
I’ve struggled with this. A quick look at my “work” browser tab illustrates this nicely:
This taxes our already information-overloaded brains. In Lauren’s piece, she references a study from the University of Sussex which found that the more a person multitasks, the less gray matter they possess in the part of the brain which handles cognitive and emotional processing. In layman’s terms, multitasking messes with your brain!
Lauren offers a few suggestions that center around the curation of news, content, and web links. One is a tool called Nuzzel that does two useful things:
1) Suggests topic-specific newsletters to the user, based on their interests
2) Provides you with content that is likely to be of interest to you, based on who you follow on Twitter
It’s pretty simple — sign in with your Twitter account and you can see sorted lists of content that are prioritized based on the number of Twitter followers who have interacted with that Tweet. You’re also able to cast a wider net and the content that your “Friends of Friends” are interested in:
You can check out Lauren’s entire blog entry here.
#3: USE A PASSWORD MANAGER… to save time and prevent frustration:
Estimated Time Savings: 2 hours/month
Our CTO, Tobias, recently converted me from being a person who had no good system for managing passwords to someone who can’t imagine living without a tool to do so. The primary benefit of these tools is the provision of very secure passwords which you don’t have to keep track of.
The biggest value-add for me is the time it saves. With LastPass (the tool we use at Shelf), I can access all my passwords directly from within the browser. Prior to this, I had a crazy-long master spreadsheet which was a pain to utilize. The time savings are amplified when you’re sharing passwords amongst your team. As LastPass blogger, Lauren VanDam, explains,
“When sharing passwords in the workplace, it’s too easy to lose accountability and too difficult to make sure everyone is following good password security practices. Teams often share these passwords over email, instant message tools or other non-secure ways. Password managers, like LastPass, mitigate risks by allowing you to share access without sharing passwords.” — Lauren VanDam
Read the blog in its entirety, or check out a screenshot that sums up what I like about LastPass (and Password Managers in general).
One click of the browser extension allows me to auto-populate my secure password into a login field, generate a secure password for any sites where I’m creating an account for the first time, and launch my entire library of passwords.
#4: ZAP YOUR PRODUCTIVITY APPS… so they work together:
Estimated Time Savings: 1 hour/month (per productivity Zap)
Zapier is a web application that makes automating tasks (a.k.a. a Zap) simpler by connecting different web technologies easily and elegantly.
The biggest benefit here is that you don’t need to be a programmer to implement Zapier. Other technologies make this claim but fail to live up to the promise. Tara Reed’s blog is a good place to start to learn about how to leverage Zap and other technologies without writing code. The CEO of a tech startup called Kollecto, Tara Reed highlights the many advancements she’s made as an early-stage company without any programming capabilities.
Being able to easily automate processes that formerly required the skills of a coder is a game changer because writing code is HARD. With Zapier, they’re always creating new Zaps and they do a good job of highlighting some of the most frequently used ones.
Let’s say you’re having a hard time ensuring your Facebook Ads leads are receiving your MailChimp email newsletter. In less than five minutes you can automate the process of aligning your leads with MailChimp through Zapier.
#5: FIND YOUR FLOW WHILE WRITING …by eliminating distractions:
Estimated Time Savings: 1 hour/month
Writing can be challenging, especially when it involves creative collation of research, company message, and author’s voice.
We have a tendency to make this task harder on ourselves than it has to be. Jean Tang, CEO of the copywriting company MarketSmiths and contributor to Forbes, explains her process for simplified, streamlined copywriting in this video.
The goal is to to get into “the flow,” so you can produce quality content in the shortest amount of time possible. Here, a little preparation can go a long way. This simple checklist will help you eliminate distractions, setting you up for success before you write a word of copy.
- Figure out if your problem is one of lack of inspiration or a lack of information when suffering from writer’s block
- Lacking inspiration? Find some way to clear your head (Jean suggests some sort of physical activity — going for a walk, yoga, etc.)
- Lacking information? Type a couple of keywords into Google and start browsing. If you’re writing a piece of copy for work, see what the thought leaders in your industry are writing about.
- Develop an outline before writing any copy — the structure will help keep you focused and the process of creating an outline will bring clarity to what you hope to achieve with your copy.
- Gather all of the information you’ll need — research, outline, brand guidelines, interview notes, etc. — so these writing aides are readily accessible.
Preparing to write and the act of writing are two separate activities, and it’s best to treat them as such.
#6: MANAGE INBOX CHAOS… by utilizing labels:
Estimated Time Savings: 1 hour/month
Focusing on your inbox when tackling information overload is a powerful place to start as it likely contains the majority of your documented communications. Adding structure is beneficial whether you receive dozens or hundreds of emails per day, helping you to filter out the “noise” and prioritize accordingly.
HowToGeek provides a detailed, step-by-step approach for setting up your Gmail inbox for greater efficiency and decreased clutter. It starts with the simplest, high-level suggestions and shows you how to build in additional logic to save time and prevent frustration.
“Labels allow you to organize your email messages into categories. They are similar to folders, however, unlike folders, you can apply more than one label to a single message.” — HowToGeek
By using the Labels feature to mirror the first few layers of the standardized folder structure we talked about in Tip one, you seamlessly move from inbox to folder and vice-versa without having to think about how something is being categorized.
- On the left hand menu in Gmail, locate the link to Manage Labels. It is towards the bottom and if you and if you don’t see it right away, click “More” and you’ll see it there.
- This will bring you to the Settings screen. From here, scroll down until you reach the Labels section.
- Click the “Create New Label” button.
- Enter the name of the first folder in your folder structure (see Section 3 above). Repeat this step until all of your top level folders are recreated as Gmail labels.
Creating the first layer of subfolders in your folder structure (again, see Tip one above) is more useful to de-couple the subfolder categories from the top level categories. So, do not “nest label under” any other folders.
Decoupling one layer of categories from the other makes it a lot easier to filter your inbox in different useful ways because Gmail allows you to add multiple Labels to one email chain. If they didn’t do this, my approach would be different. Here is a small sample of my inbox where this consistent structure has been applied via Labels:
By separating the layers, I can filter across different categories. This way I can see all of the different categories within a particular project OR I can sort by a category and see across different projects.
This is a more powerful approach because it allows for greater flexibility on how you view your emails, making retrieval an easier task.
By extending the shared folder structure naming convention to your inbox and utilizing Labels, you’ll greatly reduce the amount of time spent locating content from within emails.
#7: SAVE YOUR MOST IMPORTANT CONTENT IN ONE PLACE… so you know where to find it:
Estimated Time Savings: 2 hours/month
We see great value in centralizing important information — an easy thing to say, but not always the easiest to do. As Shelf’s CEO, Sedarius Perrotta, explains, the combination of different cloud platforms and an increasing diversity of content types has created a problem:
Let’s imagine that you’re working on a pitch deck for a client about their content strategy for the next 12 months. Because it’s a new account (and a major brand name) everyone on both sides — including senior management — will be reviewing what you produce. You put forth your absolute best effort into the deck by: conducting market research, profiling key competitors, analyzing their website and social media accounts, reviewing the deliverables outlined in the client’s contract, and more.
Instead of having to navigate across your email correspondences, the web, your company file server, and the shared Dropbox folder your two organizations use to exchange files, you can connect everything to Shelf so you have a single location for all of the different types of content that ultimately go into making a compelling pitch deck.
The biggest time savings, however, are realized when you need to locate a particular piece of information. Shelf’s findability tools give you a number of ways to locate information, reducing the amount of brain power you need to exert on this task. Matching your folder structure (Tip one) and Gmail Labels (Tip six) would further reduce unproductive Search time.
Setting yourself up for success only takes a few easy steps:
- Install the Web Clipper so you can capture any sort of interesting content found on the internet (blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.)
- Upload the folder structure you created on your company file server in Tip one and all associated files.
- Connect the cloud storage accounts you use (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.) to effectively search inside the documents stored there.
- Use Hatrack Filters and Search to find whatever you need in seconds.
Stop asking yourself questions like “Where did I save this?”, “Who sent me that link?” and “What was that file called?” and stay focused on more important tasks.
CONCLUSION:
Reducing brain tax that’s created when searching for information across platforms makes these suggestions valuable.
Viewed through the prism of a single act, these suggestions seem rather meaningless, but humans are in the near constant state of information storage and retrieval, performing these tasks upwards of 100s of times per day. Considering the effect these tips can have over the course of a day, week, month, or year gives great value to ironing out these inefficiencies.
If you adopt these recommendations, you’ll have more time available for the things that matter, and a clearer head to make better decisions overall.
