Stretch Conference Special Edition

In this new episode of IseeQ’s TechTalk series, Elisa Coluccia Senior Engineering Manager at Zendesk and Péter Váradi Engineering Manager at IBM talk all about information overload and push notifications, while giving us concrete tips on how to manage it all ourselves and survive without immense amounts of stress.

In this short article you will only find our favourite bits of the discussion but if it has caught your interest, you can listen to the full podcast episode on one of the links above.

Currently located in Dublin and overseeing 4 development teams, Elisa’s mission is to reveal the inner potential of engineers and team leads working around and with her, leveraging emotional intelligence and cognitive science, as well as through this interview she is inviting all of us to discover our own inner potentials in managing our information intake.

Information accumulation as such  is not a newfangled thing, it has actually been with us since writing was invented, then through the invention of printing, all the way to today’s digital era. The only difference lies in the method of delivery, as it was rather “pull” back then, while now it is “push”. People had to have the interest first (and the money, as it was rather expensive to lay hands on books) and then they could get all the information they were looking for, while today everything is rather pressed on us, without us even asking for it and in immense amounts. That is the real turn we have taken during the digital era regarding information accumulation, arriving at a state of overload.

Departing from the historical overview and touching upon a rather personal aspect of it all, Elisa tells us that we – as millennials – were actually born into this phenomenon, “we are digital natives, so we are used to get all the information, ever since we were little”. If we think about it, it is actually a good thing, it only becomes a problem when we cannot manage it, cannot maneuver between pure distractions and actual valuable information. This, however, depends mostly on the individuals and how they set boundaries on whether or not they would like to receive certain information. “It is when you lose the control and you let the external media take the control over you” as Elisa adds. To which Péter makes the following remarks “even though we are born into this ‘too much information’ world we still do not have the defense mechanisms, we have to learn them”. Thus, we really do have to develop and practice our own ways of avoiding unnecessary information. If we do not do that in time, we can easily end up with a sort of addiction, loss of focus, issues with setting priorities, and the list goes on.

Elisa tells us about an interesting research from the US, during which a Maths teacher asked the students to put their phones out on the corner of their desk: the 23 students together generated more than 260 notifications in only 30 minutes, of which 182 were social media notifications. We are talking about kids, who are bombarded with messages, constantly distracted, presupposing that this whole situation just gets worse over time because entering into the working world also means receiving more emails and calls etc. To the question of how it affects our physical and mental health, Elisa tells us that it increases stress (increasing the level of cortisol), thus intoxicating our body.

But how much data are we actually taking in each day? There is no specific estimation today but Elisa says that back in 2008, researchers in the US had shown that Americans were taking in over 34GB of data everyday, only in their leisure time. It seems like a large amount but if we think about it, we often find ourselves reading the news on our phones right after having woken up, opening up social media, watching netflix or some tutorials on YouTube, commenting on Twitter etc, so it easily adds up. Another research from 2011 had shown that Americans were taking in an amount of data equivalent to reading 174 newspapers per day. And we are just at the beginning regarding that it is becoming even easier to get access to even more information so we need to learn to somehow control it, “we need to turn the table around from push to pull again” as Péter points out.

Push notifications are everywhere: on our laptops, desktops, phones, watches etc but there are indeed ways to handle them smartly. Apart from using certain settings that people tend to forget,

Elisa gives the following techniques as some hands-on tips to manage our information intake:

1  Setting (core) values

2  Categorising them as important, urgent and not important

3  Developing routines

4  Disconnecting and allowing ourselves the time to think

This way we can look at the different information when we want and the kind that we want to see “but it takes a conscious effort” as Péter concludes.

If you are interested in what the above mentioned 4 techniques really entail and in general you would just like to hear more about this topic, then you should listen to the full podcast episode because surely there is more information you do not want to keep unheard.

If you are interested in other topics as well, you should keep following our BLOG where we are coming with new TechTalk episodes every Monday.

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