Information overload is usually pictured as a flood: too many messages, too much news, too many tabs, all rising faster than anyone could read. I think that picture is slightly wrong, and it's why the usual advice doesn't stick. There has always been more out there than one person could take in. The overload starts when we try to hold and process too much of it at once, in our heads, this afternoon. That version of the problem is one you can do something about.
I build an app for saving things, so I think about this more than is probably healthy. My worst weeks are never the ones with the most input. They're the ones where I'm carrying thirty small, unfinished things around at the same time: a reply I owe, an article I meant to finish, a price I wanted to compare, something a friend told me to look up.
The amount of information in the world didn't change that week. What changed was how much of it I was trying to keep on the desk.
Too much to know is an old complaint
About two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius about reading too widely. "Everywhere means nowhere," he warned, and then, more practically, since you can't read all the books you own, "it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read." The whole letter is short, and it could have been written about a read-later app.
The modern phrase is younger. The social scientist Bertram Gross used "information overload" in his 1964 book The Managing of Organizations, and Alvin Toffler made it famous six years later in Future Shock, his 1970 bestseller about what happens to people when change arrives faster than they can absorb it. Around the same time, the economist Herbert Simon put the cost in one line, in a 1971 essay on organizations: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
The vocabulary keeps changing. Business writers say "infobesity," as in a 2013 Bain & Company piece that called it the enemy of good decisions. Wellness writers say "digital overwhelm." Most of us just say "too much information" and sigh.
Notice what Seneca, Gross and Simon have in common. None of them is complaining that information exists. They're pointing at the receiver: the reader, the organization, the attention. Researchers still define it that way. A widely cited definition says overload happens when "the amount of information exceeds the processing capacity of the recipient." The recipient is the interesting part.
The desk is small
Here's the picture I keep coming back to. The world's information is a library. Your attention is a desk. The library has always been too big to read, and that's fine; libraries are supposed to be. The trouble starts when you try to pile the library onto the desk.
And the desk really is small. The psychologist Nelson Cowan, who studies working memory, puts a number on it in a 2010 review: a central store "limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items in young adults." Not thirty. Not the forty open tabs. Three to five.
So when we say "too much information," we usually mean too much information in progress. The unread email is harmless in the inbox. It becomes a problem when it's also half-open in your head, next to the article you meant to finish and the thing you were going to look up.
This is also why filtering alone tends to disappoint. You can halve your inputs and still feel swamped if every input that gets through turns into something you have to keep track of.
What the research says, and what it doesn't
The research is messier than the advice articles make it sound, which I find oddly reassuring.
In 2023, Miriam Arnold, Mascha Goldschmitt and Thomas Rigotti published a systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology that pulled together 87 studies, field reports and conceptual papers on coping with overload. It describes the classic finding as an inverted U: more information improves decisions at first, then past a certain point makes them worse. Overload is also linked with strain and burnout, and with lower job satisfaction.
But the same review is frank about the cures. It calls the strength of the evidence mixed, and finds a lack of methodologically sound studies testing whether the popular fixes work. Plenty of advice, not much proof.
The attention side has a famous result too. In 2009, Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner at Stanford compared heavy and light media multitaskers in a paper in PNAS. The heavy multitaskers were more easily thrown by irrelevant things, both around them and in their own memory, and they did worse on a test of switching between tasks. It's a comparison between groups, so it can't prove that multitasking caused the difference. Still, it fits the desk picture uncomfortably well: the people juggling the most streams had the hardest time keeping the irrelevant ones off the desk.
So I hold my conclusions loosely. What follows isn't a cure. It's what has worked for me, next to the research that points the same way.
How to deal with information overload
Fewer inputs, chosen on purpose
Seneca's advice still works. Pick a small number of sources you trust and let the rest go by. Unsubscribe from the newsletters you archive unread. Mute the group chats you only skim. This isn't about virtue. It's about not inviting things onto the desk that you'll then feel obliged to deal with.
Batch what's left
Most information doesn't need you the moment it arrives. In a study at the University of British Columbia, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn had 124 adults check email only three times a day for one week and as often as they liked for another. People felt less stressed during the limited week. Most of them also found it hard, which matches my experience exactly.
Batching works because it turns a hundred small interruptions into a few sittings. The desk gets cleared in between.
Give every open loop somewhere to go
If I could keep only one habit, it would be this one. Unfinished things nag; psychologists have called it the Zeigarnik effect for decades. E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found something useful about it. In their 2011 studies, unfinished goals caused intrusive thoughts and hurt performance on an unrelated task. But when people made a specific plan for the goal, the interference went away. The goal didn't have to be finished. It just had to be handled.
I think saving works the same way when it's done well. "I'll look that up later" keeps nagging. "It's saved, and I'll find it when I need it" lets your head put it down. The catch is the second half of that sentence. If you don't trust the place you saved it, your head keeps holding it anyway, which is how you end up with hundreds of tabs you're afraid to close.
Retrieve, don't file
Filing asks you to make a decision now about a future you can't predict. Which folder will you open, six months from now, to find a recipe you saw on a Tuesday? I don't know, and neither do you. So we file badly or not at all, and the pile grows.
Retrieval moves the effort to the moment you actually need the thing, when you know exactly what you want. That only works if you can find it by describing it the way you remember it, which is the idea behind searching by meaning instead of keywords. I wrote more about the approach in how to organize your digital life without filing it all.
One caveat. If you saved something because you want to learn from it, saving isn't enough. That's the collector's fallacy, and the fix is to read it and write a sentence about it. If you only need to find it later, saving is plenty.
How I build for it
This argument is a big part of why Reminari exists, so take my enthusiasm with a pinch of salt.
The goal isn't to show you less of the world. It's to give the things worth keeping somewhere to go, so your head can let them go. You save from the share sheet in one tap: a link, a screenshot, a note. Reminari reads the text inside screenshots on your device and keeps links with their title and preview. You don't file anything. Later you ask in plain language, "what was that article about sleep and caffeine?", and the answer comes from your own saves, with the sources shown. Everything is encrypted on your phone, and the cloud AI is optional.
It won't cut your inputs for you. That part is still on you, and on Seneca. It's Android first, iOS is in active development, and you can join the early access list.
The library will keep growing. The desk doesn't have to.
Frequently asked questions
What is information overload?
It's having more information to deal with than you can process well, which makes it harder to focus and decide. The term appeared in Bertram Gross's 1964 book on organizations and was popularized by Alvin Toffler's Future Shock in 1970. It's sometimes called infobesity.
What causes information overload?
Volume plays a part, but the bigger driver is how much you try to handle at once: constant notifications, several streams in parallel, and unfinished tasks you keep in your head. Working memory holds only a few items at a time, so anything that keeps adding to it crowds it.
What are the best information overload solutions?
The most practical ones are simple: cut your inputs to a few sources you trust, check messages in batches instead of continuously, and give unfinished things a reliable place to live so your head can stop holding them. Research on formal interventions is mixed, so treat these as habits to try rather than cures.
What is infobesity?
Infobesity is another word for the same problem: taking in more information than you can digest, to the point where decisions and focus suffer. Bain & Company used the term in a 2013 article arguing that companies should gather the data their critical decisions need, and no more.
