Helping Employees Avoid Information Overload

The Columbia Business School reported that workers had to process information equivalent to reading 174 newspapers per day in 2019. This is possible because employees now have access to more information and data than they ever did before. 

The data can come from internal and external sources, including clients, colleagues, and management. Information overload is such a serious issue because it takes the worker’s focus away from the critical work they should be doing, leads to more errors, and severely diminishes creative problem-solving abilities. Understanding all this, how can businesses help employees deal with this issue?

1. Ask Them to Be Selective

Employees who work with a lot of information are more likely to fall into the trap of spending their time and attention where it does not produce the desired results. Leaders should encourage employees to be selective with what they focus on and spend their time on. By doing so, they will be able to more easily delegate or outsource less important tasks and give important ones the attention they deserve.

2. Prioritize No More Than Five Tasks

The human brain typically remembers five to seven things at a time. When employees keep looking at their to-do lists, that presents a problem where they see they have too much to do. They may end up paralyzed and do nothing instead.

To deal with this issue, employees should prioritize, at most, five tasks. These are the ones that matter the most, are most urgent, will have the most impact, or are a combination of the three. With a system in place, they can complete one at a time and refill their to-do lists as they do so.

3. Prioritize Important Information

Information overload becomes inevitable if an employee is bombarded with a lot of information in short bursts, especially if it requires a lot of mental energy to understand and act upon. Asynchronous communication has helped solve this issue for many organizations, but there is still a need to prioritize important information.

Doing so is relatively simple; send all information to employees, but only ensure the important updates show a notification or ping them. By using employee communication software that allows this level of targeting, you ensure employees are never distracted by information they do not need to respond to or act upon immediately but still have to check out later.

4. Tackle Related Tasks Together

Another way to prevent information overload is to handle related tasks together. These already require the same information or type of thinking, so there will be nothing else to research or add to the list of things you should remember. Creating 30-minute blocks to handle each task is best, but workers can create blocks of whatever length suits them best.

This strategy works so well because it eliminates the cognitive burden associated with moving between unrelated tasks and is a known productive killer.

More information is not necessarily bad, but it can become a hindrance if employees allow it to overload them. They can use different tools and strategies to manage this phenomenon, with employers encouraged to help them with this challenge because doing so ultimately benefits the business.