Curse Of Information Overload

The day is all of 24 hours. And the information to be captured, assimilated and retained is huge!  

As the day breaks and our eyes fall on our cell phone, its a deluge of information. Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, advertisements, news channels, entertainment channels, ineffectual reports, data sheets, power point presentations, unimportant mails, etc. etc. compete for our seconds. There is so much to sift and process. Our poor little brain goes into a nervous tizzy.

Remember the school teacher’s common refrain to a student in the class, “Come back! You are physically present but mentally absent”. Now, the refrain may well apply to all age groups. In our continuous effort to make sense out of all that is thrown at us, we assimilate some and get brain foggy about other vital happenings around us. Information overload is not only polluting our working environments but also encroaching into our personal lives. Its time to use mindfulness and get the maximum out of our 24 hour day.

Lots of people who raise noise on benefits of multi-tasking may themselves end up getting nothing done. It’s easy to drown in information and pass it off as productivity. In reality it’s just over-indulgence. Michelle Gibbings, author of the  book, Step Up: How to Build Your Influence at Work says, “As you switch from one activity to another you lose concentration and, ultimately, become less productive”. While, it is physically possible to do several tasks simultaneously, accuracy and performance drop off quickly. Multitasking is also linked with poor performance on behavioral measures as we miss out on subtle signals of how the person conversing with us is feeling and thinking. 

Daniel Levitin, cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist and writer of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (2014) says that the problem isn’t as much about the storage of the information as it is about organizing and retrieving that information. He advises to do the most unpleasant tasks - “Eat the Frog” - first thing in the morning, so that the rest of the day goes better. Levitin says, “Important decisions should be made at the beginning of the day, when gumption and glucose is highest,”

Use Mindfulness to Beat Information Overload and Get the Maximum Done in a Day:
1. Differentiate between useful and useless information
2. Identify a single source of truth
3. Limit interruptions caused by email, text messages, callers and visitors
4. Don’t bank on multitasking; its a myth
5. Avoid making counter-productive associations
6. “Eat the Frog” in the morning
7. Follow the famous Eisenhower Matrix (DO, DELEGATE, DEFER, DROP) 

Lastly, don’t overlook sleep, music, walk and vacation as stress busters.

As a speed-breaker, its okay to switch off your antennas and take refuge in oblivion !!