Information Overload Day

What the day is

Information Overload Day is observed on October 21. It began as a corporate initiative, backed by research groups and technology companies, aimed at the productivity cost of constant interruption.

Figures put about on this subject should be treated carefully. Estimates of how much of the working week is lost to distraction vary enormously depending on who commissioned the study and what counted as a distraction, and several widely quoted numbers come from vendors selling the remedy.

Origin and background

What is reasonably well established is that switching tasks is expensive. Attention does not move cleanly between activities: some of it remains attached to the previous task, which is why picking up work after an interruption takes longer than the interruption itself. Studies of office workers have repeatedly found interruptions arriving every few minutes and recovery times measured in tens of minutes.

The volume problem is genuine but it is not new. Complaints about unmanageable quantities of reading material appear after the printing press, and scholars in the seventeenth century built elaborate note-taking systems to cope with more books than any person could read. The modern difference is that information now arrives unprompted and carries social obligation. A notification is not merely available; somebody is waiting.

The other change is that much of the flow is designed to capture attention rather than to inform. That is a commercial arrangement rather than an accident, and it is worth naming as such before treating the problem as personal weakness.

How to take part

• Turn off notifications for everything that is not a person contacting you directly.
• Check email at set times rather than continuously, and tell colleagues that is what you are doing.
• Protect one uninterrupted block for the work that requires actual thought.
• Unsubscribe properly rather than deleting the same newsletter for the fourth year.
• Leave the phone in another room for an evening and notice how often you reach for it anyway.
• If you send a lot of messages, send fewer and clearer ones. Overload is produced collectively.