Exploring the three forms of overload — cognitive, emotional and social — and how they quietly undermine focus, judgment and execution.
Open your favorite movie streaming platform tonight, and you’ll choose from something like 100,000 titles. Open your inbox tomorrow morning, and you’ll find five urgent, unrelated projects. Open social media, and you’ll feel, for a few seconds, faintly stupid for not being a multimillionaire yet, because somehow dozens of people your age already are, or say they are.
Open your other social account, and there it is again, the ad for the 60-day calisthenics transformation program, and with it a small shame you’ve watched it three times now and still haven’t started. Scroll for another minute, and you’re no longer sure if what you just read was real or manufactured to look real, and there’s no obvious way to check.
Deadlines, comparison and information movement existed before. What’s new is the volume, the speed, and the fact that it all now arrives at once. Technology moved communication and access faster than anything before it. Organizations got better at generating priorities and initiatives than they ever got at resolving them. The result is a level of input that would have been unthinkable to someone doing your job 20 years ago.
We’ve built an entire industry of tools to sharpen our performance, automate tasks and jobs, even calm us down when it gets to be too much, and many of them are genuinely extraordinary. But they’re built to optimize the load, not to understand it.
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