Too Much to Think About

How Much is Enough?

Making better decisions and overcoming information overload

“I don’t understand this. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Don’t worry, me either.

As the world continues to learn more through 2021 from the pandemic of Covid-19, it’s safe to say there’s been a lot of opinions for decision making thrown around. Did we get things right? Where did we go wrong? It’s a lot to take in. News and media are working overtime to keep up with the day-to-day changes (often hour-by-hour). Similarly, many people have felt they must stay on high-alert to take in all the information needed to stay safe. Sparking the amygdala in our brains — hard wired for fight or flight — our attention is captured by the ever pressing news being yelled at us from our screens. Is this new or is this the way it has always been, because it feels so different this year. It’s been incredibly difficult to remain calm at times when it seems like everyone is growing hostile and there’s so much contagious confusion and combativeness infecting our culture.

While we live in a digital age of information overload where seemingly everyone and everything demands our attention, our decisions seem to be wired for stress and scarcity as we live lives of predictable consumers and it’s about time we take our decision making to live better lives of intentionality.

This is a crazy time for all of us, and it can take away our breath and our joy easier than what we think.

And quite honestly, I’ve seen others remain more sane by limiting their news intake to two, 15-minute cycles each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. I think there’s a lot to say about this process of placing an intentional filter on how much information we take in. Do we really need to even watch the news each day, let alone twice a day for that matter? Not every minute of every day needs to be stressful. Not every decision needs to be an emergency.

Everyone is talking about BIG DATA and its many applications, especially during this strange and unfamiliar time. Just as digital technologies exist with given constraints and bandwidth limitations, the human brain can only process so much information at once. We’re always going to learn more, but we don’t want to overwhelm ourselves, less we face paralysis and fear (which many have). As we learn more about this virus and how it spreads, the world of tech continues to learn more about the applications for 5G technologies and cloud computing; more and more data is being recorded, compiled, and produced every day. Many people have suggested that the next greatest phase of innovation will come from data aggregation and its applications.

In its many forms and languages, the sheer complexity of information requires high-level mental processing skills with a well-equipped perspective. Not all information available is presented in a format that we can understand or provided in a language that we can connect with. This is where metaphor, storytelling, personal experience, or anecdotal evidence is often used to help us synthesize the data and make sense of things. Sometimes, not even the experts know the whole truth.

What’s the infection rate?

What’s the fatality rate?

How many people are getting sick, and how quickly is it spreading?

Synthesizing such depth and breadth of information during this time is nearly impossible for one human to handle. Covid-19 came at us out of nowhere, and before we knew it we were thrust into a global public health crisis. Every day, our decisions matter. Social distancing is a new way of life for all of us. We’ve needed to learn how to adjust and adapt at a rapid pace.

But without all the information, nor capacity to fully understand it, are we really doing all that well to take on the next stage of life?

We are all-too familiar with the difficulties of jumping into a project halfway through completion or taking on a new task without being part of its initiation. Transactional, fragmented work leads to poor work, poor communication and poor decision making.

Familiarizing oneself with the specificity of the information takes time. Likewise, we cannot immediately assume we have a worthy vision; we must acknowledge the need to shape and acclimate our lens to the given information’s culture. We need help and we need to be brutally honest with ourselves about the kind of help we need. You can reclaim your calm with the choices that you make.

Let me put it another way: We are the best experts to evaluate a situation and make decisions with any amount of information if the information presented is not in a language we can understand. Ask me a question about matching colors on the color wheel, shading styles, or color hues and I’ll be lost despite. I lack the quality and quantity of experiences in my background for personal integration of this information and thus remain limited in my understanding. I must rely on a better-prepared expert artist in this specific field of information from color, art and design.

In this modern age of information overload, it’s no wonder so many people feel stressed when simply shopping for groceries for their family, which we would think would be a seemingly simple act. We’ve flown rockets to the moon for goodness sakes, and we struggle to stick to our list and engage in regular shopping with ease and comfortability? In such a highly stimulating environment of a grocery store, it’s clear that the human brain has a limited mental bandwidth to process all this information.

With a-million-and-one decisions to choose from, processing every stimulus in that environment is increasingly impossible for the common shopper, let alone a parent with three kids in the cart with a 30-minute time crunch. In my health and nutrition world, I often discuss how information overload then leads to predictable decision making fueled by desperation, scarcity, fear, and unhealthy choices. These topics have been further explored and presented by both PBS (Hacking Your Mind) and Netflix (The Social Dilemma) in recent times. Understanding human nature and human behavior is not only something to equip media and marketing, we can acknowledge our human potential, and our limitations to better navigate this complex world.

Not all the information provided in the example photo below is necessary to process in order to buy groceries for the family. Yet the endless amount of stimulants overwhelms our decision making, complicates and suffocates the actual information we care about. The brain’s behavior sparks attention, awareness, processing risks and rewards as well as some level of our fear of missing out (FOMO). The assumption is that more information to the consumer equals greater decision-making capabilities; but this is not always the case. The power may not actually be in our hands as much as what we think.

Barry Schwartz writes a fascinating narrative discussing many of these topics in his famous “Paradox of Choice.” He also highlights how some successful people often decide to narrow down decision making processes by simply laying clothes out the night before or having one or two outfits in total to choose from. Placing a few automated steps in the beginning of the day seems to help jumpstart freedom of thought without restriction for the day.

Feel free to check out his TED Talk here.

No more feeling petrified while looking at your closet wardrobe; if you only have two options, the decision-making process becomes much easier. Simplifying the process of decision-making by limiting choices can be an effective strategy for success. Planning ahead by scripting a list for the grocery store is one of the best ways to narrow choices and focus efforts in such a highly stimulating environment as the grocery store. As data aggregators, we have to know what we’re looking for to decipher and understand what we need to be looking at.

Surrounded by content on a daily basis, we fail as we miss the forest for the trees.

Take a library, for example.

A peaceful place filled with millions of books, magazines, periodicals, and digital archives that requires specific categorical classifications and coding (the dewey decimal system) in order for both librarians and common visitors to navigate the labyrinth of columned shelves in search of a specific text. The organization of this information is important for any explorer to be able to make an effective and efficient decision for their next read. Only when we have a specific title, author, or genre in mind can we effectively retrieve the information we need. If we went book by book, shelf by shelf in search of what we wanted to find, our search would be endless.

Schwartz acknowledges an abstract, common occurrence within the human experience that we often overlook in our modern lives.

Information overload leads to analysis paralysis.

Sometimes we are overwhelmed with information and cannot make sense from the overload of data points. Every person has a certain data processing speed and capacity to hold information. I’m sure you can imagine someone you know who thinks and speaks quickly, and just as easily someone else who works much more slowly. They both have talent, they both have blind spots. Every person has a unique lens and vantage point to offer insights to blind spots and biases to highlight for others. Our best creative processing — and thus our best decision making — can come from insightful feedback rather than causing ourselves to struggle with inertia when we live lives in isolation.

Chaos Control

In the entrepreneurship department at my university, I often heard the work of sole entrepreneurs as being “too entrenched in the business” to effectively “work on the business.” Partnerships on the other hand seemed to scale much faster and develop iterative feedback loops much more easily with their customers. Researchers as well, as firm believers in their work, may spend such extensive time and effort working deeply in their discipline that they become fully immersed in its minutiae of details. Research teams can help balance out the workload and allow each one’s creative genius to complement the other. Battling the chaos of information overload is a problem and undeniabe in all professions. It’s simply human nature; humans have limitations.

Many experts have a high attention to detail. And it’s been said that excellence lies in the details, but with nose to the grindstone and a microscopic lens, sometimes we lose sight of the big picture and how some of those details connect. We miss the forest for the trees. We must fly out above and beyond the canopy to take a broader look at our situation to truly evaluate it effectively. Once we understand the big picture, we can learn how to navigate our path best to get to our desired destination with less time and less resistance.

Intrapreneurs, mediators, and even third-party research firms can work magic in these situations. Vacation time can also be used here to disengage, separate, and return with renewed perspective and rekindled spirit. We all need quiet time, or time alone away from the work in order to take a fresh look at the big picture. We too often get lost in the madness, engaged in our work through what I’ll describe as chronic isolation.

We see this in healthcare, education, and practice.

Young students in high school decide on majors of study in college and university related to their given interests and passions. They complete their degree with high-level focus, hundreds of credit hours to their name, and thousands more dedicated towards personal study and practice.

Credential exams prod the rigor, stability, and educational fortitude of individuals. High-achieving students have to often put themselves through an intense gauntlet of expensive and extensive examinations to become a qualified professional in their field. Yet, this degree of hyper-focused education leaves narrow room for external, diverse experiences or a broadened lens to be developed. Thus, we ‘ve been left with a health care system today built by specialists, which while incredibly talented in their line of work, are often ignorant of anything outside their area of expertise. Referral leads to referral leads to referral. Sometimes specialists fail to connect the dots, fail to put the full puzzle together, because they’re only able to see from their corner of the world. With 15-min visits from most physicians, you can imagine how difficult it is to see the big picture and address the real issues rather than simply address the symptoms with an immediate prescription.

It’s only natural for us to feel lost.

Failing to see the forest from the trees, we may get to know one tree with incredible detail but fail to see how each tree in the forest forever communicates within the grand ecosystem that makes us the forest itself. With a magnifying glass in hand and nose to the ground, we can easily forget we are surrounded by millions of other plants, animals, insects, air, wind, and water, soil and sounds of the forest that we can take into account to better understand the the holistic ecosystem of this single tree.

All of the information is valuable to consider for the life and health of the tree.

Perhaps collaboration would warrant greater wisdom. What more can we learn by gleaning from a balanced wisdom of many, perhaps the wisdom of a crowd would provide us with greater understanding.

Many failed endeavors and polarized judgments would result if we failed to share information and opinion, code and innovations. Collaborative learning on the other hand can expedite solutions and problem solving. International research networks, open access journalism, and democratization of news and media have helped edge us closer to gain more shared human experience in all parts of the world. Take Medium for example, which has taken a strong stance for authentic storytelling and reporting from valuable writers, researchers, journalists. A curation, or data aggregator, for the thought leaders of today as most people continue to swim in a drowning sea of information overload.

Greater decision-making can come from diversifying one’s portfolio of spectacles to evaluate the given information. We put on our glasses to gain clarity and we often suggest to put on someone else’s shows to learn more from their personal and unique perspective. Just like in retirement, diversification can be a strong defense to failings or isolated investments. It never hurts to get a second opinion (but not a thousand) of an interested stakeholder. Don’t ask a veterinarian for the best coffee recommendation, and don’t ask your local barista a question that would be better suited for your phlebotomist. There is much wisdom to be gleaned, but at some point we must conclude our search of information and process what we have so far. When taking the time to go shopping alone, just remember to take your list and stick to it. Don’t get distracted by the millions of signs for advertising, sales stickers, and catchy slogans beaming at you from around the store. Know what you want and know where to get it. The mission can be much easier if you focus your attention on what you need to know.

Those endless aisles of bold fonts, electric colors, and enticing flavors are enough to turn the necks of statues. It’s hard for us not to get caught up in the madness of the supermarket. In all you do, try to manage the amount of information you’re asking yourself to process. This is a crazy time for all of us, and it can take away our breath and our joy easier than what we think. Maybe you can do yourself a favor and take a break from the constant news cycle for a little bit and go take a walk or play a board game with your family. When was the last time you relaxed? Be mindful of your time and also your attention. You can take back your decision making, you can rest in the choices that you make and make each day a little bit easier. Your decisions do matter and you don’t have to make decisions out of stress.

We can only handle so much.

Take back your life, take back your decisions. Every decision we make can make a difference in our quality of life.

Crafting conversations I think worthy for us to have. We live in a crazy, undefined world. We really do need one another in order to live our best lives possible on this planet.

We Zig and we Zag our way to health and happiness.

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