Is information overload a problem, or does the problem lie with us and our inability to focus choice in environments with ever shrinking effort gaps?

Information Overload: refers to the state of having too much information to make a decision or remain informed about a topic.

A large amount of the copy that exists on the subject begins by citing statistics on the increase of stimuli we are bombarded with every day, they explain how this is bad for you, me, and business, and then they proceed to list some tips and tricks on how to reduce and organize this burden of value questionable knowledge. Without being too hypocritical I would like to share my views on the subject:

The biggest problem I face is that: It’s not the amount of information that poses the challenge, its the tendency to “task jump” from one thing to another; from an interesting blog post, to a news article, to a social media friends page,to a new interesting blog post, …. oh yeah I wanted to look up a recipe for bruschetta chicken to make for dinner tonight.

While not debilitating, I have experienced those days that seem to fly by without resulting in much tangible progress, whether at work, school, or home. Now you could argue about the definition of progress, is it always necessary? What about relaxing? Learning new things often comes from simple exploration. etc. However, if you have something that needs to get done, you automatically sign yourself up for the efficiency vs. effectiveness challenge, are you busy or are you accomplishing something?

With the number of physical sources of information approaching 1, the effort gap required to switch between tasks is getting smaller and smaller. For example: If I went to a physical cookbook instead of an online listing for that wonderful chicken recipe, the effort gap that I would face to get distracted by reading paper mail, or to become immersed in my current fiction novel (Jackdaws by Ken Follett), or to begin reading a National Geographic Magazine article, is large and hard to bridge. But, if you hop onto Spilling Buckets to get the recipe, pretty soon you are ( insert winking smiley guy ) reading other interesting articles, visiting the site sponsors, commenting, off reading other blogs… you may never get to the recipe.

As I take my other foot and move it across the hypocritical post line, here is what has worked for me and some tools to help:

1. Get things out of your head and onto paper. Our end all resource for getting organized and becoming more effective is a book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity by David Allen [Free - Library, $6 - Half.com, $9 - Amazon.com]. This resource showed me how to clear my mind of all the things I could be doing and to create an organized system to focus on actually doing them. If interested we wrote a review on the book, it can be found on our blog and also on Associated Content.

2. A reading of RyanScottMiller’s blog article on the subject led me to ZenHabits who writes about simplicity and the effectiveness of approaching one task at a time:

Multi-tasking leads to a lot of switching and distractions and stress. Keep things simple, focused and effective by single-tasking. Focus on one task until it’s done, then move to the next.

Combining the two ideas:
First, by removing all the things I could be doing from my head and organizing them externally, and second, focusing on one item at a time until completion, continues to help me deal with the ever shrinking effort gap.

Now where was that recipe again?…

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Tagged as: personal development