For the past few years, the term ‘information overload’ has saturated numerous media outlets, from reputable scholarly journals to more mainstream magazines offering solutions to an apparent epidemic sweeping the modern world. The argument contends that the accessibility of information online, from go-to search sites such as Google and Wikipedia, to social media outlets, are overwhelming our cognitive functions. Simple decisions are portrayed as burdens and procrastination is to blame for a generation lazier than ever before. These sorts of claims, however, are something that hard-working young students would undoubtedly take issue with. Fears of information overload are clearly overblown, particularly in the case of highly-educated students. Worries about too much information should not overshadow the agency of individuals in navigating online realms.
The other side of procrastination implicated in information overload is termed decision fatigue. Not only has technology increased the amount of information out there, it has increased the speed at which we handle it. Higher levels of productivity require more decisions every day for each individual. Professor Daniel Levitin suggests that we are in fact limited to the number of decisions we can make a day under sound mental judgment.
In the day-to-day lives of students, it’s plain to see that there are more choices and decisions to make, ranging from food products to career paths. Levitin contends in his work The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload that the raw amount of data humanity has produced in the last 10 years is greater than the sum total we had created previously.
Greater availability of information—made obvious by the negative connotations of the word overload—actually has the potential to impair cognitive functions. There is undeniably more information for each one of us to parse through in our everyday lives, and as a result, procrastination has become a more prominent issue in modern society. The focus on procrastination has created an endless discussion and supply of articles that all claim to provide the step-by-step solution to conquering information overload. Yet despite this discourse, people are still productive. Too much information may be a potential source of additional stress, but it is is not the cause for reduced productivity.
Information overload may be what unconsciously leads students toward a ‘short’ Netflix break or a full-on downward spiral of procrastination; but most students emerge from said breaks to continue on with their responsibilities. Students are so aware of the danger posed by Facebook feeds filled with entertaining videos that they will temporarily turn their wireless connection off to get a paper written or even employ a friend to take away their cell phone until a particular task is completed. Students have adapted to the availability of distractions. The issue therefore resides not in the access to information, but how individuals manage their own responses to that information.
Procrastination and decision fatigue can clearly be problematic results of the pace at which we receive information today. That being said, students and professionals make use of coping techniques that fall in stride with Levitin’s suggestions featured in Forbes. People take breaks, write to-do lists, prioritize, and do their best to focus on one task at a time. As students paying for an education, productivity is still of a high enough importance to encourage adaptation to the challenges that accompany the ease of accessibility to a multitude of distractions.