Information Overload
Three Things #53: January 29, 2023
The biggest little problem in my life is information overload. It’s a little problem because it’s not exactly life threatening—let’s face it, there are worse problems. It’s a big problem because it does impact my mental health and my livelihood, and because it bothers me every single day. If I had a magic wand, information overload is the problem that I would wave away. I think it bothers me so much because I don’t feel as helpless in the face of my other problems.
This problem has a lot of symptoms. I wrote recently about how life has become too complicated and why it’s so hard to focus today. Those are some of the symptoms. I want to zoom in specifically on dealing with information overload this week.
I’m worried about information overload for three reasons, one small, one big, and one somewhere in between.
The small reason is that it’s annoying. It gives me FOMO. I have a long list of “must read” books and articles that I’ll probably never read, “must listen” podcasts that I’ll probably never listen to, etc. I have hundreds if not thousands of unanswered emails and text messages. I’m a conscientious, process- and progress-oriented person. I love to make lists. Making lists that only grow, that I know I’ll never finish, really irks me on some psychological level.
The in between reason is simply that I know I won’t remember most of the content I’m consuming. I’ve read about and listened to dozens of different topics this week via articles, books, audiobooks, magazines, and podcasts, not to mention social media. Many or most of them are genuinely interesting and important topics. I really care about many of these topics. But I only have so much mental energy, so much ability to focus, and so much empathy. Without more structure, and without repetition, I’ll almost immediately forget that fantastic, moving article I just read and the cause it championed—and I’ll have trouble recalling it or any of the details just a few hours later.
The big reason is that unfortunately I’m not alone in losing most of this information. In fact, it’s a serious societal problem that, in the extreme, could lead to civilizational collapse. If that sounds hyperbolic, consider. We’re deluged by crappy, unimportant information dressed up so that everything appears critical: clickbait. When everything is urgent, nothing is. When everything is must-read or must-listen, nothing is. When everything is canon, nothing is fundamentally true. Amidst this deluge, we’re losing grip on the content and ideas that truly matter. I’m very intentional about how I spend my time and about the content I consume. And I’m seriously struggling to read books—real, thick, important books, books written by actual experts who know what the hell they’re talking about, many of them long ago and quite far away. We’re not paying enough attention to this problem, and it’s much bigger than people think.
We’re losing Shakespeare and Tagore and Lu Xun in favor of Buzzfeed and Twitter and the trash that passes for “news” these days. That’s more than tragic: it’s stupid, and reckless, and down the road we’re going to pay dearly for this as a society.
One more thing: I am not a productivity guru and I have more questions than answers. This is just my own attempt to figure out my strategy for dealing with this problem. You’re more than welcome to join me in figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
Thing #1: Shut It All Down
This is the simplest and one of the most tempting strategies. When I feel truly overwhelmed (which is more and more of the time), rather than try to fine-tune which things I consume and which messages I respond to in which order, I just give up completely. Recently, I’ve given up almost entirely on consuming digital content outside of working hours, in favor of paper books and magazines. I’ve also found myself hand writing cards and letters. I hardly touch my phone on weekends or while traveling and rarely respond to messages outside of working hours. I think this is the main way I’ve managed to avoid burnout as long as I have, in spite having not taken a real vacation in seven years. It’s critical to titrate the overwhelming flow of information and to realize that you are not obliged to consume or respond to everything.
Of course, shutting everything down for hours or days is pretty extreme. It can be done in a more fine-tuned fashion. Twitter and Telegram, in particular, have a way of feeling so overwhelming that I find myself checking them only once or twice a week (I wonder if there’s a law that says that the more communication you receive on a channel, the less you tend to consume it). And I almost never feel overwhelmed on work channels like Slack because I love my job and I love my colleagues so much.
Shutting down can also be done in a task-driven fashion. Being productive today requires switching between different modes of operation, what Paul Graham referred to as “manager time” and “maker time.” There’s a “light work” “manager time” mode where I can respond to messages in more or less real time, take and make phone calls, do light work and small tasks in between, and generally operate in a more interrupt-driven fashion. I need to spend at least two or three hours each day in this mode. But there’s also a “deep work” “maker time” mode where I shut off the world. I close and lock my office door. I put on noise canceling headphones and listen to music. I close all of my apps, turn off all notifications, and put my devices across the room. I can work joyfully for hours in this mode, and I often lose track of time while doing so.
Being able to schedule and stick to both modes, and being able to transition effectively back and forth between them, is enormously challenging. It requires training your colleagues and even your family to know that they’ll be unable to reach you during certain times. But if I couldn’t shut everything down for a few hours a day, I’d never get any real, deep, meaningful work done. The manager time is only done to enable and unblock the maker time, and I’m never happier than when I’m in maker time (at least, this is what I tell myself to get through the stressful manager time!).
There’s one more challenge with deep work: doing any kind of knowledge work these days requires access to devices and internet—and these have a way of throwing alerts and distractions in front of you despite your best intentions to the contrary. I’ve spent countless hours configuring my software, devices, and work environment to minimize distractions, but there are still far too many.
Shutting everything down is surprisingly effective when done right but it’s also a big, blunt tool and should not be overused. It’s dangerous because it means disconnecting from other people and from the rest of the world. That’s why it’s so important to emerge every so often and reconnect—with intention.
Thing #2: Put Things in Boxes
If shutting everything down feels extreme, a less dire alternative is to shut things down selectively by putting them in boxes. Alternatively, you can think of this strategy as switching from an “opt out” mode (where, by default, you’re plugged into every channel all the time) to an “opt in” mode (where, instead, you intentionally select which classes of communications and content to receive and consume, when).
There are several ways to compartmentalize content and correspondence. The most obvious option is time. Check your email a set number of times per day—say, once or twice, and never for more than ten minutes. Any task that takes longer than ten minutes—responding to an email, doing a task—gets immediately deferred or delegated. (GTD gets this part right. For each incoming message, you have four options: immediately do the task, defer it, delegate it, or else delete it.) Set a time to read a paper book before bed, or maybe first thing in the morning.
In practice, beyond generic rules of thumb (“try not to look at your phone while working”, “read for a few minutes before bed”), I struggle with timeboxing things in this fashion. I think it can work well if you’re highly disciplined, have strong will power, and have a lot of autonomy over your work and your life more generally. Working on a high pressure team and having a family both make this borderline impossible to stick to. Having as many apps and channels to keep an eye on as I do also makes it a bit impractical.
What works better for me is specifying times of day when I can and cannot be reached, when my notifications are on or off. There are only two brief windows during the day—at the start and end of the work day—when my notifications are on for a few minutes. I occasionally, but rarely, check particular apps at other times. In general, I try to adopt a “pull” rather than a “push” approach to notifications: I check particular apps and channels, intentionally and at specific times, rather than alerts being pushed to me all the time.
I’m experimenting with a strategy that’s even more promising: expanding the frame from one day to, say, a week. In general, I like a weekdays-weekend strategy. With respect to content, on weekdays I’m very disciplined. I consume very little other than the one or two books I’m reading and the podcasts in my queue. On weekends, I allow myself to “cheat” and binge on whatever content I like, including random stuff from my reading list and, once in a while, even a little TV. I’d like to go further and assign particular days of the week to manager time, maker time, family time, etc.
The most important ingredients in a compartmentalization strategy are discipline and intentionality. With strong discipline I think it’s possible to zoom out even further and block off entire weeks for, say, information detox or catch up or exploring new and different stuff. We all need lots of focused time, and we all also need time to wander. The wandering is important, too, as it brings in fresh ideas and inspiration. And without timeboxing, we’ll spend all our time putting out fires and never make time to wander. Take my word for it as someone who’s guilty of this.
In general effective compartmentalization requires good categorization of content. Work-related content and communication has to go somewhere other than where random reading goes, which in turn needs to be managed differently than “focused, intentional” reading (i.e., books and other long reads). In a particular situation—before bed, while working out, commuting, on the toilet, whatever—it needs to be super easy to pull up the next thing in the queue or return to your last place. I do my best with this, using Trello boards, Pocket tags, Audible, and Spotify, but the tools to do this are pretty awful. Which brings me to the next topic.
Thing #3: Tools
I reflect a lot on tools. As the famous saying goes, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” The protocols we use to communicate and consume content today were largely designed and built for a much simpler, slower, smaller world. And we’ve done an abominable job shaping the tools built on top of them.
There’s a number of reasons for this: they weren’t designed to handle the sheer volume of information flying at us today. Nothing is interoperable, data are siloed, and nothing talks to anything else. Hacks and data breaches are outrageously common. By and large these tools are not customizable, not open source, and not trustworthy. By and large they’re owned and operated by big companies that don’t have our best interests at heart, to put it mildly. Most perniciously of all, most of these tools are actually designed to distract us, to trigger dopamine hooks and keep us engaged as long as possible. I could go on (I have).
Reflect, if you will, on this state of affairs for a moment. The situation is quite dire, far more than I think most people realize or appreciate. The very tools we use to get work done, to communicate with the most important people in our lives, the places we store and transmit and analyze our very most sensitive data, all of these are beyond our ken, in the hands of a tiny number of unaccountable companies. Has this ever been true before in the history of humanity?
This state of affairs is killing us. It’s killing our focus and our productivity, our capacity to receive and process high quality information and learn, and it’s drowning us in clickbait while making it difficult to access truly high quality content, or even to tell the difference. These tools are turning us into monsters. I know that sounds severe but there’s no other way to put it. Social media has turned the most engaged, connected, enthusiastic citizens into monsters with short attention spans and no interest in hearing or considering perspectives outside their own echo chamber. The common sense ability to detect truth and motive has not kept pace with the ability to use these powerful new tools.
I’m convinced that we need a radical rethink and redesign of the tools we use to handle content, correspondence, and collaboration. The tools we have today emerged from the froth of the early internet and web, first through open standards and protocols and later through the hegemony of big tech companies that built on top of and captured those standards. They’re not necessarily the best. Many are just the first, or at least the first to scale, and due to economies of scale and network effects, they’re what we’re stuck with for now.
We need content management and communication tools that put us firmly back in the driver’s seat. We need tools that we truly control, tools that work on our behalf. Tools that show us exactly what we’re after, rather than drowning us in advertisements and clickbait and things we didn’t ask for. We need tools that let us aggregate content from many different sources and in many different formats; easily index, sort, and search that content; and share it quickly and easily. We need tools that put us in control of our data.
It may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not: this challenge is up there with climate change, public health, and world peace. It’s one of the great civilizational challenges that we presently face. Freedom of access to information, and the efficiency with which we can access, interact with, store, retrieve, update, and share that information, is truly a gating factor on how fast and how far human civilization can and will evolve. If we can’t process and share information ever more efficiently, progress will slow and eventually stop. It’s as simple as that. We don’t get progress for free. I’m convinced that this is nothing less than a civilization-level existential challenge. We will overcome and we will escape from this rut we’re presently stuck in, but it’s going to take big changes.
I don’t know precisely what shape these better tools will take, but I can clearly see the outlines. They’ll be decentralized, accountable, and well governed. They’ll be open source and customizable, modifiable and shareable. They’ll be standards-compliant and built on top of open protocols. There simply is no other way forward. What we’re aiming for is the Linux of Google.
If you squint, you can see a better future just over the horizon in projects like Urbit and Holepunch. These projects are getting better and attracting more users and supporters every day, but there’s an enormous amount of work to do until they’re user-friendly and mature enough to offer a real alternative to the status quo. But Linux did it, so we know it can be done.
So one answer to the question, How do we manage information overload? is: help build better tools (and standards, and protocols). Another is to use open source, decentralized, free software as much as possible and keep our data out of the hands of shitty companies. As one successful example, I switched about a year ago from Evernote to a fantastic, free, open application called Logseq and I haven’t looked back. Unfortunately I haven’t found usable, open versions of most of the other tools I rely on daily, but I’ll keep looking and I’ll keep building.