What You Need to Know to Conquer Information Overload

One of my first freelance clients was located on the East Coast in Boston, while I lived in Los Angeles. At first, I didn’t think it would be much of a problem. But eventually the time difference started to get pretty stressful.

It always seemed like I was playing catch up. Since my client was three hours ahead of me, I would sit down at my computer in the morning already feeling behind. I’d wake up at 7 am to a cascade of unread emails and notifications demanding my immediate attention. This made it pretty difficult to focus on my work without feeling like my attention was being pulled in a hundred different directions.

In the age of the internet, high-speed connections, email, and instant messaging that goes straight to the devices we keep on ourselves nearly 24/7, information overload is both real and a huge problem. With all the ads to click, blogs to read, and posts to like, it’s no wonder we often feel like the internet is drowning us instead of lifting us up.

Because the truth is, we can only really concentrate on one thing at a time. Multitasking is simply not feasible. When we “multitask,” what’s really happening is we’re switching from one task to another rapidly, which, ironically, ends up making us perform worse than if we had just focused on one thing at a time. Information overload is…