or too many goals to accomplish, or do they waste too much time in excessive travel? If this is the case, then you need to adjust the responsibilities to be more realistic so that you and your colleagues can achieve your goals. If not, then we can look at some strategies that may help you tackle the perils of too much information and too many choices, and ultimately make good decisions. Note that the strategies focus on you taking control of the information environment rather than feeling controlled by it.
Stick to the Relevant
You live in a world in which information systems are constantly throwing more and more facts, figures, and opinions at you. What you really need are systems that filter out unimportant or irrelevant information. The key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. The brain is always trying to discern patterns and make meaning out of new information. Relevancy makes our attention span stretch a bit further, improving our information-processing capacity and cerebral efficiency so it takes less time and attention resources to acquire the information we really need.
Disregard the Unimportant
Some corporate emails have the same value as junk mail. Devise a method for recognizing them (for example, by name of sender or topic) and send them immediately to the spam folder.
Apportion Your Time Based on Importance
Not every item of information is equally important. Give the most time to those that really matter and skim or ignore the rest.
Prescreen the Information
Consider having all information pass through an assistant who knows your preferences and sends you only the material you need to see. Occasionally look at a sampling of screened-out material to ensure the assistant is following your directions and to avoid becoming isolated.
Divide the Burden
See if there is someone else in the organization who should be getting some of the information instead of you. Divide the overload, and meet with colleagues, when necessary, to share information and work toward a decision.
Practice Chunking
When faced with too much information, the brain attempts to combine items that have similar characteristics—a process known as chunking. Chunking can increase the number of items that working memory can hold. Get that pencil and paper again. Stare at the letters below for seven seconds. Then look away and write them down in the correct sequence and groupings. Ready? Go.
TVI RSCN NF BIU SA
Check your results. Did you get all the letters in the correct sequence and groupings? Probably not. Most people do not score 100 percent on this after looking at the letters for such a short period. Let’s try it again with the same rules. Stare for seven seconds and write down the letters below in the same sequence and groupings. Ready? Go.
TV IRS CNN FBI USA
How did you do this time? Probably much better. If you compare the two examples, you will note they are the same letters in the same sequence. What happened here? In the first example, the groupings made little or no sense. Thus, the brain treated each of the fourteen letters and each of the four spaces (because grouping is important) as a separate item, resulting in a total of eighteen items. This total well exceeds working memory’s capacity, so you could not remember the example accurately. But in the second example, the brain quickly recognized the five understandable items, and the total was within working memory’s capacity. The major difference between the two examples was how the items were chunked. Chunking improves your ability to remember the items. That ability, however, is dependent on your knowledge base. Because the letter combinations were familiar to you, you were able to chunk quickly and accurately. Recall trying to remember that ten-digit number earlier in the chapter. People who spend a lot of time calling others on the telephone often remember all the digits correctly. That’s because their brains are accustomed to chunking ten-digit numbers as the area code + prefix + extension, so 9237546302 is quickly represented in the brain as (923) 754-6302. Practice chunking by linking relevant items of information together using some common characteristic, such as their similarities, differences, advantages, disadvantages, functions, or structures.
Accept the Practicality of Satisficing
When there is just too much information and too many choices, resist the search for perfection. Realize that your competitors are in the same overload quagmire as you, and, except in extraordinary circumstances, settle for satisficing. If you do the satisficing in a rational—rather than arbitrary—way, then you have a practical and defensible approach to information management.
Value the Power of Unconscious Thought
You will recall that the studies of Dijksterhuis, Messner, and Iyengar revealed that those participants who got less information, who pondered over it, and who delayed their decisions were much more pleased with their final choices than those who amassed large amounts of data and made a quick decision.21 For the latter, regret over their choices eventually set in. These results point to the value of unconscious thought. Allowing information to settle and percolate in our unconscious system may ultimately provide the best decision. But too much data can impair the unconscious processes. Loran Nordgren and his colleagues Maarten Bos and Ap Dijksterhuis, for instance, found that when people face a large amount of complex information, they tend to default to their conscious system, a path that often results in poorer choices.22
So what’s the answer? Do you ignore some of the information and settle for satisficing? In a word, yes. But even that approach can have its challenges; when faced with an information avalanche, your brain has a difficult time deciding which items to ignore. This is especially true when you are gathering information online because every new item links to other new items and so on. Furthermore, it is often difficult to determine the validity and reliability of online information. The researchers suggest that the best strategy, then, may be to use your conscious mind to acquire and screen only the relevant information, move on to some other tasks while the unconscious processes do their work, and then make a decision. With this approach, you are taking advantage of the strengths of both the conscious and unconscious systems and limiting their weaknesses. Several of their studies confirm that the best decisions involving complex choices engage both conscious and unconscious thought and that this sequence is better than conscious or unconscious thought alone. These findings might be difficult to accept because they seem to contradict the notion that the more rational thought given to a complex decision, the better. How do researchers explain this conscious/unconscious paradox?
The Conscious/Unconscious Paradox
As we learn and develop more expertise in our work, the brain builds large and robust information and skill banks in our long-term memory. It also establishes networks that remember the feelings associated with our experiences. Because the emotional brain has a powerful and resilient memory system, we tend to remember the best and worst things that happen to us. We forget mediocre and uneventful experiences quickly. Can you remember what you had for dinner a week ago last Thursday? Probably not, unless it was a special occasion or you got sick from the food. In those instances, the good or bad emotional responses helped you to remember the meal. Whenever you have made an important decision that resulted in a spectacular success or a disappointing failure, your brain retained your feelings of joy or gloom as part of the experience. Over time, these cognitive decisions and their emotional messages form a rich pool of experiences through which you can filter a potential new decision. But that takes time.
The rational brain is very competent at making mundane decisions, such as picking a shirt to wear to work, and at solving simple problems, such as balancing your checkbook.
