Less is more: Dealing with information overload

By Andreas Thieme Apr 4, 2010, 11:33 GMT

Berlin - Receiving an email message can be a pleasant and energising thing. But 30 email messages waiting for you first thing in the morning or a laptop that chimes with an incoming message every minute or so can be both distracting and disorienting. That translates into stress.

Yet the information flood is not just an email issue. It's precipitated by the waves of information we receive from the web in general. Fortunately, there are ways to handle it.

Start by remembering that not every newsletter has to be read and not every email message must be answered immediately, says Michael Ziegelmayer from the German Association of Psychologists (BDP) in Berlin. A practical approach is to create folders to sort incoming mail based on urgency. This makes them easier to review afterwards.

Trying to stay on top of every aspect of breaking news can also be a major drain. Given the incredible volume of information out there, it's not a particularly reasonable goal either, Ziegelmayer says. Moderation is a better option. Concentrated attention tends to be more restricted: only a fifth of the content on the monitor actually reaches our consciousness.

Professor Sabine Trepte emphasizes as well that there's no way to read all potentially interesting items in a concentrated way. Skimming a portion of it is usually sufficient. 'That is part of the filtering process,' the media psychologist from the Hamburg Media School notes. That means selecting a specific spectrum of the information, 'not unlike watching television,' Trepte notes.

The key is knowing what your goal is, Trepte says. If you're interested primarily in political backstories, then monitoring two or three selected portals is generally good. Those who want to keep informed about the latest events around the world can probably even focus on one source.

What about those accustomed to using RSS feed readers or services like Google News Alert, which sends notifications in real time when an news site has updated information? Trepte recommends setting up fixed times of day to concentrate on that content.

Heiko Sill from the Intelligenz System Transfer (IST) agency in Potsdam, Germany doesn't see these rigid time limits as helpful, at least not compared to content-based ones. Setting up just three times a day to check email message puts users under serious pressure. Yet the psychologist is also clear on one thing: follow every link and you'll quickly be distracted - which in turn leads to stress.

An even stronger stress factor is the feeling of losing control over the incoming information. Ziegelmayer thus recommends that 'users pose themselves the question of which information they really need and how dependent they are making themselves on it.' Viewed in the cold light of day, many things are not really as necessary as they first seem.

This applies for example to newsletters that start coming once you've registered with a website to purchase something online. Messages from social networking sites like Facebook fall into the same category. Those messages are often best simply shut off directly on the website.

You should also debate whether and to what extent you wish to be available on instant messaging, Sill recommends. And is the push-function for email messages truly necessary? In business settings the answer is often 'yes,' but at home not necessarily. 'You're not following the information, but rather you feel like the information is chasing after you.'