Information Overload or Anxiety?
A friend sent me a copy of an article “Death by Information Overload” from the Harvard Business Review. I think the headline says it all.
It canvassed the usual complaints of living and working in a constantly connected state.
A study of Microsoft workers found that:
“…once their work had been interrupted by an email notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task… and more than half that time was spent after people were ready to return to their work: cycling through open applications; getting distracted by other work in progress; and reestablishing their state of mind.”
There are certainly plenty of productivity gurus now urging us to turn our backs on the evil of multi-tasking and go towards the light of perfect offline focus.
What I found more interesting was another aspect of information overload that the author, Paul Hemp, touched on in passing.
“…it’s not just the incoming tidal wave of email and RSS feeds… it’s also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in order to keep up… we’re drawn toward information that in the past didn’t exist or that we didn’t have access to but, now that it’s available, we dare not ignore.”
I’ve suffered from this information anxiety.
Feeling compelled to research and research again other people’s experience, advice and 5-step programs before making a decision myself.
Worrying about systems for managing all this information gathering (AKA hoarding), and being so overwhelmed by the task of synthesizing the data to generate something actionable, that I freeze up.
And the comparing! The relentless consuming of other people’s words leave me wondering if I’ll ever have anything useful to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times before.
It’s a creativity killer
The secret of life may be hidden in one of those many ebooks or bookmarks languishing in my ‘to read’ folder, but I probably wouldn’t recognise it if I saw it – I’d be too busy trying to process the next bit of information.
There’s no space to reflect, to absorb, to create my own connections and ideas.
That’s the bottom line. For better or for worse, I can’t create* in this barrage of STUFF. And if I can’t do that then what I am doing?
* For more on the create, consume, connect relationship check out Charlie Gilkey’s excellent article of the same title. He says:
…you can’t breathe in and breathe out at the same time. Taking in information is breathing in, and creating something is breathing out.
A new definition of useful
For the practical stuff, the how-to stuff, the build your business and change your life stuff, it’s not enough that it might be handy someday, it really must be something I can use now.
And that judgment involves not only assessing the content, but also assessing my capacity and need. Truth is, I’m sure I could spend at least a year simply going deeper into, and taking action on, what I already know.
Which is why, for at least the first part of 2010, I made a conscious decision to shut off the flow of how-to for a while. To turn inward and mine my own resources.
I suspect you probably know a lot more than you think you do.
When you next feel that moment of uncertainty, you might want to take a moment before you google, read the latest expert advice, buy another product, or check out what your colleagues are doing. Take a moment to call upon your own resources.
Refilling the creative well
Although I have mostly shut off the flow of how to information, I’m not actually on an information fast.
It’s more a matter of avoiding the pre-processed, pre-packaged stuff that’s produced to provide fast fixes.
I guess, to jump onto a popular trend, I’m trying out ’slow’ information.
I still read blogs, but blogs written by thoughtful people I like. I find myself avoiding the ones I know are ‘laser-focussed’ and prescriptive – the ones that seem to consistently point out what you’re doing wrong and offer a 10 step process to fix everything, all in 350 words or less.
I’m savouring books. Books with broader themes I can digest slowly. Stuff that invites me to make my own connections. And podcasts with interesting people.
This isn’t a prescription for you
More an observation of how I interact with information, and an experiment in modulating that flow.
It seems to me that maybe there is something shifting here – from an initial stage of using productivity hacks to better manage the information overwhelm and do more in less time, to developing deeper relationships with information (and the people that share it) that better serve our individual capacities and needs (and so deal with the underlying anxiety).
I don’t have a neat, 350 word how-to for this process. But I think it may start by knowing yourself.
