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So we meet again, computer...
Have you ever found yourself feeling bogged down and overwhelmed while doing a task on a computer that involves some research or information-gathering ? It's not so easy to stay on task with alluring temptations like ESPN, Amazon, and YouTube just a few easy clicks away. Moreover, the never-ending sushi conveyor belt of links we are faced with when googling anything triggers our reflex to look at one more website out of the fear that we will make a mistake by not considering all the options.
The fallacy of "just one more."
The psychological itch to look at just one more link when we are doing research is the same innate human tendency that is exploited by Instagram's infinite scroll function and Netflix's autoplay feature, which starts the next episode as soon as we are done with the last one. This can in part be explained by the variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, a fancy way of saying we are easily addicted to things that have an unpredictable possibility of a large payoff. Do not underestimate the power of the rush of dopamine that is released when we (often subconsciously) anticipate that the next post or video is going to deliver a hit of novel pleasure.
The ubiquity of analysis paralysis.
Even the seemingly simplest tasks we try to perform online can turn into full-fledged meltdowns. Imagine you are shopping for a rug online. How hard can it be? You do a quick Google search for "best, cheapest, prettiest rug, free shipping" and get funneled to Wayfair. On just one website, there are thousands of rugs to narrow down by shape, size, color, pattern, thickness, and 20 other rug characteristics you never knew were important before but will also no longer matter once your dog pees on it a week after you buy it. Overwhelmed, we might give up and decide to look at a different website, only to have merely exacerbated the choice-overload problem we had in the first place. A famous study about consumer choice has found that people are less likely to buy a product when presented with 24 options compared to 6 options, much less thousands.
The problem of choice overload does not merely happen when we are online shopping. When I am researching for a blog post, for example, I may start with an idea that leads me to search for studies that present evidence for my idea. I open up a study, which inevitably has links to other cited studies that seem quite intriguing, so I click on those, too. Before I know it, the top of my screen looks as if I am running an experiment to see how slow I can make my browser run.
What can we do?
Here are three tips you can implement right away to keep your computer from stressing you out:
1. Keep tabs on your number of tabs.
Set a limit on how many tabs you keep open at one time. A good rule of thumb is three to five, but also listen to yourself and notice how many tabs you can have open before you start to feel a sense of existential angst. That's your signal to start closing tabs. The number will vary from person to person based on individual threshold for being overwhelmed by information, but, typically, the fewer tabs open, the better. And you can help yourself by...
2. Mine the information, then immediately exit the mine.
...mining each tab for the relevant information and then commit to closing it. We often leave tabs open due to a sense of loss aversion, in that we are afraid of losing the information. Don't get trapped in the mine because of the illusion of anticipated loss. Remind yourself that you found it once and can find it again easily, be it in your search history or with another search, which on one hand may take more time than if you had kept the tab open but, on the other, may save you precious time that would have otherwise been wasted shifting attention from one tab to the other. Research has shown that we lose quite a bit of time in the transition and startup costs of switching from one task to the other.
3. Complete your projects.
Practice finishing tasks to completion. Setting a rule and time limit to complete a task helps you make quicker decisions and is better than keeping things open-ended to come back to. Remember that there is a start-up cost every time you have to switch tasks. It is the difference between lighting a fire and keeping it aflame versus letting a fire go out and having to rekindle the flame from scratch. Furthermore, each time you practice staying focused on a task to completion, you reward yourself with a sense of accomplishment and closure as well as build the mental fortitude that you can make decisions and complete tasks in a timely fashion in the future.
I hope you begin practicing these skills to improve your focus, productivity, and relationship with technology.
