Once in a while an article or research gets published about how people feel overloaded with information. Lately it was a Dutch study (article in Dutch) that got a lot of attention, while it actually told not much new. 28 % of employees felt overloaded with information in 2018, an increase of 3% compared to 2014. When we studied information overload (more than 10 years ago!), it was mainly email that caused the feeling - nowadays it's a combination of email, mobile phone and app messages. What made this study interesting is that the researchers dug a bit deeper than the usual "do you suffer from information overload" question. 60,000 Employees between 15 and 75 of age were questioned. The topic information overload was part of a bigger research question about working conditions in the Netherlands.
So from the study we learn that higher educated people suffer more than lower educated employees. There was no difference measured between men and women. Managers complain most about the number of information they get, people in the ICT-industry are the second in the list. For a large percentage of the people who suffer, it was reason to think about finding another job. The last finding indicates that it's a serious issue, but I wonder if it would really help to change jobs. Do people expect that there will be less information overload in another company? Managers will probably still get information from 'above' (their leaders) and from 'below' (the team members they manage).
Questions that come to my mind (I didn't read the details of the study): is it the quantity of information or the quality? Our own study indicated that especially the lack of quality was an issue (people were wondering why they got this message, what was expected from them and had to interpret the information to find out what was in it for them). Although nowadays I can imagine quantity of information has increased, so it will be a combination. Another question: is it a personal lack of skills, habits or it is a bigger, more generic issue? Has quality of information gone down (think fake news), which makes it harder to filter out what is useful (so then even good skills aren't sufficient). Maybe AI can help us in future to filter and select the information we need.
I'm afraid that information overload is an issue that will stay, for a long time at least. We can partly help ourselves by rigurously cutting off the flow (unsubscribe to channels, less apps, etcetera), ignore the feeling of missing out. Changing habits is incredibly hard, but it's a place to start where we are in control.