Information Overload Wrecks Performance—And How AI Can Help Prevent It 

In my article Three Numbers Spell Burnout, I discussed how our information diet went from 10 pages worth of information each day back in 1986 to 150 pages of information today. This article will discuss in more detail why burnout is perhaps the least of our problems when we’re forced to regularly deal with information overload and how AI can help us avoid those problems. 

It is, of course, ironic that I am communicating this by adding to the amount of information you are absorbing. 

Trying to keep up with the rising tide of information doesn’t immediately burn us out. It first creates a daily cognitive load that messes with our ability to focus and plays havoc with our decision-making abilities.  

At the simplest level, sorting through piles of information is tiring. As we get tired, we become more distractible, which means it takes more effort to focus on the information we are sorting through. The more effort we expend, the more tired we get, a vicious circle. If you’ve finished a day where you’ve had to dig through a pile of (often useless) information and then found you couldn’t really focus on a favorite novel or TV show, or barely noticed the dinner you were eating, you know what I’m talking about. 

Another problem with information overload is that we always feel like there’s something we’re missing (FOMO). When we feel we’re missing something, we want to keep looking, even as we’re getting more tired and distracted. And, of course, the feeling that if we just read through “a couple more documents” we’ll find what we need also makes it hard to stop and focus on anything else. It’s the dark side of when a movie ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, and you can’t stop thinking about when the next one is coming out—the work equivalent of doomscrolling. 

Decision making, which is often the point of that information scavenger hunt, also suffers from information overload long before it becomes obvious in the form of burnout. It gets harder to make decisions because we always feel like just a little more information would make a big difference—a form of analysis paralysis most of us have experienced at one time or another, and which is made worse by too much useless information.   

The quality of our decisions also goes down when we have too much irrelevant information floating around. We need to spend more time and effort keeping track of what matters and what doesn’t—it’s like trying to concentrate in a noisy room. When making difficult decisions it’s hard enough to identify the important factors without adding irrelevancy to the mix. Information overload also makes it harder for us to decide to abandon a losing strategy—too much noise distracts us from the real problems and so it becomes harder to cut our losses and move on.  

All of these experiences, if ignored, will eventually lead to burnout, much as ignoring increasing physical fatigue often leads to injury. But well before we reach burnout, the quality of our work suffers.  

How Can AI Break the Vicious Circle? 

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I will move the world.” — Archimedes 

We’ve been using levers to magnify our physical strength for a very long time. Computers, in turn, help us with all sorts of cognitive tasks—such writing, editing, and looking up a quote from Archimedes. AI is another lever, and a very powerful and useful one. It can also be a scary one, since many people quite justifiably fear that employers will try to replace them with AI.  

The thing about levers, though, is that they need a fulcrum and a person to apply force to make the lever work—without both, a lever is just a stick. With the right fulcrum, AI is the lever that enables us to do more in less time and be better at it.  

The Fulcrum is SWIRL

SWIRL enables you to leverage the power of AI to end the data scavenger hunt and dramatically reduce information overload. SWIRL provides several key features that magnify your cognitive strengths, helping you quickly find the most relevant data you need when you need it. 

• Intent detection—SWIRL uses contextual cues—role, position, query history, etc—and intelligent dialog to figure out the intent of your query so that when you ask about apples, it knows if you mean the fruit or the company and gives you the correct results.
• Relevancy detection—SWIRL combines powerful search capabilities with AI-enhanced relevancy detection so that you get results that actually matter rather than piles of unrelated information. And SWIRL uses RAG to make sure you get real results, not AI hallucinations.
• Connectivity—SWIRL brings AI to your data, whether that data is located in traditional databases, internal websites, email, WebEx, Slack, Teams, PDFs, or MSOffice files, and more, whether on-premises or in the cloud. You don’t have to remember where to look, SWIRL does that for you.
• Security—SWIRL integrates with existing security protocols, including enterprise SSO, so that each person can only access the data they are allowed to see. You can get insights from your own private data, but no one else can.
• Data stays in place—SWIRL leaves data where it is, so no need to upload everything to a vendor database or copy into a vector database. Data stays under your control so you don’t need to worry about vendor data breaches (at least not because of SWIRL).

Trying to manage today’s information load is like trying to move a large boulder. You wouldn’t want to do that with muscle alone—you’d use a lever and a fulcrum to magnify your strength. SWIRL is the fulcrum that leverages AI to magnify your mental strength so that you become better at your job. You get more done in less time, focus more effectively on the task in front of you, make better decisions, and avoid burnout. And even get to enjoy your dinner. 

To find out how SWIRL can help you leverage the power of AI to reduce information overload, contact us today.