In this day and age where most us spend over 20 hours a week on devices (that's not counting our work we do on our computers and laptops), I'm exploring what this ubiquitous connectivity does to our brains and lives....
Cognitive Overload was first discovered in the 1980s when psychologists found that our brain's working memory capacity has inherent processing limits.
Today, chances are very high that Cognitive Overload is hurting your productivity and affecting your well-being. With ever increasing distractions from our 'Always Connected' lifestyle, the mental effort required to process all this information has gone through the roof.
Here are some facts:
74 gigabytes - 9 DVDs worth of information is sent to the average American on any given day. Information received at work not included. (Study: USC Marshall School of Business)
Most people connect to more than 30 different media sources daily, ranging from traditional media outlets on TV, Radio, Telephone to new digital sources consumed on tablets, smart phones, or gaming devices.
28% of our workday is spent managing emails. That's about 2 hours and 14 minutes each day. Most professionals receive over 50 work-related emails per day. Managers and executives receive between 200-300. In a recent study only 6 percent of professionals responded that they could process more than 50 emails per day.
When at work we are interrupted (by email, phone call, text message, colleague, etc.) every 8 minutes. That accounts for over 7 interruptions per hour. A study by Basex found that the calculated cost of interruptions in lost working hours to US businesses is $588 billion a year.
How is Cognitive Overload affecting your productivity and life?
- Do you struggle to focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes?
- Do you feel a constant itch to check your emails and text messages?
- Are you overwhelmed by all the ideas and information you keep in your head?
- What can you do to manage Cognitive Overload?
A good first step: Raise Your Awareness!
I recommend taking a few minutes to answer these questions:
How many times am I interrupted in an hour?
How often do I check emails or text messages every hour?
What ideas or issues do I tend to repeatedly obsess about?