When was the last time you found yourself text messaging while checking email, watching TV and talking on the phone?

You’re not alone: Americans consume, on average, 63 gigabytes of media a day, according to a 2013 report by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Communications Technology Management. That’s the equivalent of:

• 63 hours of streaming video^[1]
• 63,000 hours of streaming music
• 10,000 times the Complete Works of Shakespeare^[2]

That’s 15.5 hours of media a day — not including time at work.

Let’s do the math: Let’s assume that eight hours at the office, eight hours of sleep, plus nearly 16 hours of watching, listening and reading. That’s 32 hours a day.

They can’t be paying attention to it all!

Linda Stone coined the term “continuous partial attention” in 1998 to describe this problem. CPA is an automatic process where, motivated by a desire to be productive and efficient, we are constantly looking at media, but never paying full attention to any message.

The result? We feel a sense of constant crisis trying to keep up with opportunities, activities and contacts on emerging technology. All of this FOMO means we can’t really pay attention to anything.

‘More than 24 hours in a media day’

Consider the numbers:

• Three in 10 U.S. adults are “constantly” online, according to the Pew Research Center.^[3] And 20% of Americans “constantly” monitor their social media feeds.
• American adults spend more than 12 hours a day listening to, watching, reading or interacting with media, according to the first-quarter 2020 Nielsen Total Audience Report.^[4] That’s nearly half of a person’s day. 50- to 64-year-olds are connected an average of 13 hours and 20 minutes a day.^[5]
• Make that 12 hours and 9 minutes a day^[6], according to eMarketer. (Why the different numbers? Different researchers simply count differently.)
• Make that 15.5 hours a day, according to USC.

No wonder you sometimes feel like a live node on the network.

“One can actually have more than 24 hours in a media day,” says James E. Short, author of the USC report. “And as we increase our level of multi-tasking, we have to expect that total hours will grow even as the total number of physical hours a viewer can consume media will remain roughly constant.”

If your readers reading your message while watching “The Crown,” trying to memorize the lyrics to “Guns & Ships” and texting their sister about Christmas plans, how much is getting through?

“Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth,” says John Medina, who’s studied how the mind reacts to and organizes information. In Brain Rules, he points out that humans are “biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.”

Indeed, even students at MIT and Stanford, researchers found in a 2009 study, couldn’t focus when drowning in data.

‘You’re not more informed’

“We take it, as a given, that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are,” writes Malcolm Gladwell writes in Blink. “But … all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all.

“In fact, that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.”

As Tom Rosenstiel, former media critic for the Los Angeles Times, says:

“You’re not more informed. You’re just numbed.”

Inform, don’t just numb, your audience.

Learn strategies for attracting and retaining audiences members  with an artificial sense of constant FOMO. Learn tactics for getting the attention of  readers driven by a conscious desire to keep up with everything, all of the time.

_____

Appendix

^[1] Andrew Moore-Crispin, “How many megabytes are in a gig? Understanding mobile data,” Ting, June 21, 2017

^[2] “How much is 63 gigabytes?” The Measure of Things

^[3] Andrew Perrin And Sara Atske, “About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online,” Pew Research Center, March 26, 2021

^[4] The Nielsen Total Audience Report: August 2020 — Special Edition: Work-From-Home, Aug. 13, 2020

^[5] Audrey Schomer, “US Time Spent with Media 2021,” eMarketer, May 27, 2021

^[6] 13 hours, 21 minutes by 2022.

The post Information multitasking & continuous partial attention disorder appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

It’s the communicator’s biggest problem: How do you get audience members to pay attention to, understand and remember your messages when they’re burdened with so much information?

Your readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers, ads included, daily. With this much information every day, how do you cut through the clutter of competing messages?

The problem with information overload, as Bertram Gross taught us, is that your readers’ processing capacity goes down as the amount of information goes up. When people struggle to manage information, not only are they unable to find the most important information — they also forget where they parked their cars.

How can you overcome information overload to get the word out in your blog posts, social media, internal communications and more? Try these techniques to deal with information overload:

6 paradoxes for breaking through the clutter

What do you do when information overload occurs? Martin J. Eppler and Jeanne Mengis recommend these six “paradoxes” for presenting information that breaks through the clutter:

1. Familiar surprise. Grab audience members’ attention in an intriguing, yet accessible, way. You might try an interesting subject line, a clever lead or an unusual graphic.
2. Detailed overview. Before diving into the details, let your audience members know what they’ll learn from this piece. You might provide context and an overview in a summary after the headline.
3. Flexible stability. Don’t make audience members learn new formats and structures to get your information. Standardized website and memo formats and information mapping help audience members find what they’re looking for faster.
4. Simple complexity. Just shaving more words off your message doesn’t solve information overload. You also need to make the information more understandable. Visual and verbal metaphors clarify complex concepts; they help audience members understand new information by linking it to familiar ideas.
5. Concise redundancy. Deliver information in multiple formats to reach different information consumers. You might present information through statistics, analogies and examples in an article, for instance, or visually and verbally in a meeting.
6. Unfinished completeness. Get audience members involved in the message with comments, polls and questions at the ends of articles. When audience members participate in a message rather than just consuming it, they understand it better and remember it longer.

Find Eppler and Mengis’s work in “Preparing Messages for Information Overload Environments.” That’s a report of the International Association of Business Communicators’ Research Foundation.

Note that cutting word count does not make this list.

Surprise gets attention.

Why is surprise so effective at overcoming information overload in communication?

Our brains are designed to notice changes so we can react to danger.

“Surprise jolts us to attention,” write Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. “Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.”

How do you create a surprising message? Chip and Dan Heath offer this three-step process:

1. Start with your key message.
2. Figure out what’s counterintuitive about that message. What are the unexpected implications?
3. Craft your message to focus on this “uncommon sense.”

To make surprise effective, make it “postdictable” — i.e., predictable after the fact. Think “Sixth Sense,” not “Black Swan.”

How to? Make sure your surprise is key to your core message. Communicate, don’t decorate.

Surprise gets attention. Curiosity keeps attention.

Increase your return on information.

In 1989, systems scientist Russell Ackoff created a hierarchy of information, from least valuable to most:

• Data
• Information
• Knowledge
• Understanding
• Wisdom

Despite this, most organizations still invest the bulk of their resources on gathering and moving data, the least on wisdom.

That’s expensive. It wastes time.

Is your copy just adding to the pile of facts — data — in your organization? Or is your piece of information likely to help your audience members find knowledge and understanding?

To increase your rate of return on information, consider Ackoff’s hierarchy before you press Send. Is your copy just adding to the pile of facts — data — in your organization? Or is your message likely to help your audience members find knowledge and understanding?

As this data deluge threatens to engulf your workplace, your company needs communicators who add value to information. They need people who translate instead of regurgitate, who inform instead of disseminate.

Do that, and you can serve as an organizational alchemist who transforms a flood of facts into a stream of knowledge. Wisdom, even.

And that’s the gold standard of the Information Age.

‘Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer’

Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., once found that a restaurant chain gave managers four to six hours’ worth of information to process each day. (That, alas, is not Gayeski’s most startling statistic, just the handiest.)

Gayeski, CEO of Gayeski Analytics, helps companies figure out how much time they’re asking employees to spend processing information.

After watching her clients’ employees deal with a huge amount of information, Gayeski came up with this rule of thumb for communicating:

“Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer.”

That would make a great job description for communicators.

Which role are you playing for your audience?

How can you make sure you’re cutting through the clutter, instead of contributing to it? One approach is to do less, but do it better.

This suggestion flies in the face of current communications cultures. There, writers and editors are expected to produce a website, weekly newsletters, daily updates and hourly news flashes for each audience they serve. (Test: When you check your inbox, how do you feel about getting yet another corporate message?)

Don’t get sucked into the system. Remember, nobody wants more information. (According to the Pew Research Center, they especially dislike corporate communications.) They just want better information.

One solution? Perform triage on your work:

1. Prioritize your efforts around business objectives. That’s a quick way to filter relevant information from irrelevant information.
2. Spend the most time on top-priority items. That will help you with day-to-day project management as well as information overload in the workplace.
3. Do a moderate job on mid-priority tasks.
4. Hack out low-priority projects. Can you get by with five Ws and an H?

Even better: Decline low-priority projects that don’t further business objectives. (The best communicators have created a culture where they can do so. One’s even created management software to help.)

The alternative? In addition to contributing to information overload, you’ll condemn yourself to a career of mediocrity.
____

Sources: “The Too-Much Information Age,” Seed Magazine, January/February 2008

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007

Managing of organizations

The post How to overcome information overload in communication appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Talk about TMI: Your readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers a day^[1] — ads included. Or so says a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Forget kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. The volume of information in the global datasphere is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2020 [PDF], according to IDC.^[2]

In just one minute, according to VisualCapitalist^[3]:

• People send 12 million iMessages
• Snapchat users sent 2 million Snapchats
• Twitter users post 575,000 tweets
• Facebook users share 240,000 photos
• Slack users send 148,000 messages
• Microsoft Teams connects 100,000 users
• Instagram users share 65,000 photos
• Zoom hosts 856 minutes of webinars

Not to mention billboards, blog posts, RSS feeds, social media and social networks, snail mail and all of the other sources of information out there. Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock didn’t start to imagine all of this incoming information.

“We’ve created more information in the last five years than all of human history before it,” says author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin.^[4]

What’s the cost of these huge amounts of information? And how can our messages break through the clutter?

What does information overload cost readers?

All of these pieces of information cause:

1. Stress

When information overload occurs, trying to manage information can deplete and demoralize you, according the Harvard Business Review.^[5] Indeed, nearly 80% of respondents to an NPR survey said they get headaches, insomnia or eye twitches as a result of information overload.^[6] Information overload can lead to real feelings of anxiety, feeling overwhelmed and powerless, and mental fatigue.^[7]

Three in 10 U.S. adults are online “constantly” online, according to the Pew Research Center.^[8] And 20% of Americans “constantly” monitor their social media feeds.^[9]

That constant exposure to news produces sadness, anxiety and stress, according to research by Wendy M. Johnston and Graham C. L. Davey.^[10] Cortisol and other stress-related hormones have been linked to inflammation, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease and other serious health concerns.^[11]

It’s no wonder that “wired” means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate,” writes Johann Hari, a UK journalist.^[12]

Some people even suffer Email Apnea. That’s author Linda Stone’s term for the “unconscious suspension of regular and steady breathing” when tackling the inbox.^[13]

And trying to keep up by multitasking actually produces more stress hormones, The Economist reports.^[14]

2. Exhaustion

The term information overload makes sense. In this environment, our brains “have trouble separating the trivial from the important,” neuroscientist Daniel Levitin told NPR. “All this information processing makes us tired.^[15]

And that exhaustion, perhaps fittingly, makes it even harder for us to process information.

“News fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response,” say researchers of an Associated Press study on the effect of reading news.^[16] “The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in.”

How much effort are they willing to put in to get through your messages?

3. Attention Deficit Trait

We consume, on average, 63 gigabytes of media a day. That’s according to a report by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Communications Technology Management.^[17] That’s the equivalent of:

• 63 hours of streaming video^[18]
• 63,000 hours of streaming music
• 10,000 times the Complete Works of Shakespeare^[19]

That’s 15.5 hours of media a day — not including time at work.^[20]

Let’s assume that eight hours at the office plus nearly 16 hours of watching, listening and reading still equals a 24-hour day. If we also assume sleep, then it becomes obvious that we’re multitasking, not focusing on, this information.

Plus — SHINY OBJECT! — that information interrupts us constantly. Texts, emails and urgent Facebook updates interrupt us every five to 12 minutes, according to information analyst and researcher Nathan Zeldes.^[21]

People have a hard time managing in this environment. Keeping up with the latest update somehow starts to seem more important than focusing on important projects. That makes it tough to complete a task.

“We’re fooled by immediacy and quantity and think it’s quality,” says Eric Kessler of Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “What starts driving decisions is the urgent rather than the important.”^[22]

In fact, we’re so conditioned to interruptions, that if information doesn’t interrupt us, we interrupt ourselves, researcher Gloria Mark reports.^[23] No wonder, according to Microsoft research, our attention spans last only eight seconds.^[24]

That’s where Attention Deficit Trait^[25] comes in. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, an expert on Attention Deficit Disorder, coined the term. He believes that the modern workplace’s information load causes symptoms similar to those of the genetically based disorder.

4. Reduced IQ

Information multitasking temporarily lowers your IQ by more than 10 points, according to a Hewlett Packard survey of 1,100 Britons. Smoking weed, in comparison, costs only four IQ points. (And, from what I’ve read, is a much more interesting way to get stupid.)

The result, according to BuzzWhack.com, is “mental Pez.” That is, “to be hit with so much information that it becomes impossible to focus on one thing. So stuff goes from top-of-mind to tip-of-tongue, only to eventually fall out of our head completely.”

What does information overload cost organizations?

All of which means that your organization’s workforce is stressed out. Exhausted. Unable to focus on the important. And possibly working with diminished IQ.

What other problems does information overload cause organizations?

1. Communication

It’s so cute that we think they’re actually reading that intranet piece on the company’s move to develop an agile workforce. Best case scenario: They’re looking at the pictures while watching Yellowstone, listening to Hamilton and texting their spouses a grocery list.

No wonder information overload during a health crisis leads to information avoidance.^[26]

2. Productivity

Employees spend nearly half their workweeks reading emails and finding information^[27], according to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute.^[28]

Email fatigue and constant notifications cause employee burnout.^[29] “Almost two in five (38%) of office workers say email or chat is the remote work nuisance most likely to lead them to quit their jobs,” according to a 2021 survey by Wakefield Research.

Add sharing that information in-house, and that leaves just 39% of their workweeks for doing their jobs.

And remember all those interruptions? One every five to 12 minutes?

Each time employees are interrupted by email, it takes an average of 24 minutes to get back to work, according to a study by Microsoft researchers.^[30] And, when your task is interrupted, Zeldes says, it takes 20% to 40% more time to complete it.^[31]

Plus, whether they’re ER doctors, accountants, 401(k) plan owners or others, overloaded employees make bad decisions.

BuzzWhack calls it the “dopeler effect” — “the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.”

3. Money

American knowledge workers waste a quarter of their time dealing with huge data streams, according to The Information Overload Research Group.^[32] That costs the U.S. economy $997 billion a year.

4. And more …

Plus, as if we needed another problem, information overload helps fake news spread.^[33]

How do we combat information overload?

Get suggestions for overcoming the overload.

___

Sources:

^[1] Richard Alleyne, “Welcome to the information age – 174 newspapers a day,” The Telegraph, Feb. 11, 2011

^[2] David Reinsel, John Gantz and John Rydning, “The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core,” IDC, November 2018

^[3] Aran Ali, “From Amazon to Zoom: What Happens in an Internet Minute In 2021?” VisualCapitalist, Nov. 10, 2021

^[4] Daniel Levitin, “This is your brain on information overload,” KUOW podcast, May 6, 2016

^[5] Paul Hemp, “Death by information overload,” Harvard Business Review, September 2009

^[6] Manoush Zomorodi, Ariana Tobin and Jen Poyant “Get a Grip On Your Information Overload With ‘Infomagical‘,” NPR’s All Things Considered, January 25, 2016

^[7] Sara Gorman, Ph.D., MPH, and Jack M. Gorman, MD, “Is Information Overload Hurting Mental Health?” Psychology Today, June 4, 2020

^[8] Andrew Perrin And Sara Atske, “About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online,” Pew Research Center, March 26, 2021

^[9] “APA Stress in America Survey: US at ‘Lowest Point We Can Remember;’ Future of Nation Most Commonly Reported Source of Stress,” American Psychological Association, Nov. 1, 2017

^[10] Wendy M. Johnston and Graham C. L. Davey, “The psychological impact of negative TV news bulletins: The catastrophizing of personal worries,” Wiley Online Library, April 13, 2011

^[11] Markham Heid, “You Asked: Is It Bad for You to Read the News Constantly?,” Time, Jan. 31, 2018

^[12] Johann Hari, “How to survive the age of distraction,” Independent, June 23, 2011

^[13] Linda Stone, “Are You Breathing? Do You Have Email Apnea?” LindaStone.net, Nov. 24, 2014

^[14] Schumpeter, “Too much information,” The Economist, June 30, 2011

^[15] “Get A Grip On Your Information Overload With ‘Infomagical’” NPR, Jan. 25, 2016

^[16] “Young adults suffering from news fatigue, study says,” The New York Times, June 2, 2008

^[17] James E. Short, “USC CTM Releases Report on Americans’ Media Consumption,” USC Marshall School of Business, Oct. 28, 2013

^[18] Andrew Moore-Crispin, “How many megabytes are in a gig? Understanding mobile data,” Ting, June 21, 2017

^[19] “How much is 63 gigabytes?” The Measure of Things

^[20] “USC CTM Releases Report on Americans’ Media Consumption,” Oct. 28. 2013

^[21] Nathan Zeldes, “Effects of information overload #1: time loss” (PDF), white paper, Sept. 19, 2012

^[22] Sharon Begley, “The Science of Making Decisions,” Newsweek, Feb. 27, 2011

^[23] “Get A Grip On Your Information Overload With ‘Infomagical’” NPR, Jan. 25, 2016

^[24] Kevin McSpadden, “You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish,” TIME, May 13, 2015

^[25] Edward Hallowell, “Attention deficit trait” (PDF), introduction to Driven to Distraction, Dec. 27, 2005

^[26] Saira Hanif Soroyaa, et. al, “From information seeking to information avoidance: Understanding the health information behavior during a global health crisis,” Information Processing & Management, Volume 58, Issue 2, March 2021

^[27] Email fatigue and constant notifications causes employee burnout. “Almost two in five (38%) of office workers say email or chat is the remote work nuisance most likely to lead them to quit their jobs.”

^[28] Michael Chui, James Manyika, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, Hugo Sarrazin, Geoffrey Sands and Magdalena Westergren, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” McKinsey Global Institute, July 2012

^[29] Eileen Brown, “Remote workers now say email fatigue and notifications are worse than commuting,” ZDNet, April 22, 2021

^[30] “Work invaders: the curse of emails, tweets and Facebook,” Evening Standard, Sept. 21, 2009

^[31] Nathan Zeldes, Effects of Information Overload, #1: Time loss, Sept. 19, 2012

^[32] “Information Overload Research Group takes aim at data deluge,” news release, Feb. 3, 2011

^[33] Filippo Menczer and Thomas Hills, “Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It,” Scientific American, Dec. 1, 2020

Additional sources:

Charles Arthur, “What’s a zettabyte? By 2015, the internet will know, says Cisco,” The Guardian, June 29, 2011

Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science, Feb. 10, 2011

Nathan Zeldes, “Effects of information overload #2: cognitive disability,” white paper, Oct. 24, 2012

“E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot,’” CNN, April 22, 2005

The post What is information overload in communication? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..