As professionals in marketing and communications, we often find ourselves drowning in information while simultaneously feeling the pressure to stay perpetually informed and online.
This demand to remain constantly informed can create the risk of burnout.
According to research published in the National Library of Medicine, “the amount of information that is created every two days is roughly equivalent to the amount of information that was created between the beginning of human civilisation and the year 2003”.
The report also states that the amount of information available has become excessive and its quality difficult to assess. “As a result, information overload has become a widespread problem.”
Toggling toggling toggling
This problem is perhaps even more prevalent in professional environments, where employees switch between multiple apps daily, resulting in fragmented attention and reduced productivity. According to research published by the Harvard Business Review, workers toggle between apps and websites to do their jobs.
The authors looked at 20 teams, totalling 137 users, across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. The findings were shocking – on average, a worker toggled roughly 1 200 times each day, which adds up to just under four hours each week reorienting themselves after toggling.
“Over the course of a year, that adds up to five working weeks, or 9% of their annual time at work.”
Simply put, we can’t keep up.
Turning point
The turning point for me came during a conversation with a colleague, who seemed constantly up to date with trends, despite having a calendar twice as packed as mine. “I don’t try to know everything,” she confided, “I just got better at knowing what to ignore.”
Her approach, which I’ve since adopted and refined, applies a few pointers to stay abreast while avoiding information burnout:
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Build an information diet – just as we’ve become more intentional about what we eat, we must be deliberate about what information we consume. What information truly matters for your specific role and goals? For me, it’s social media and content strategy shifts. Everything else is supplementary
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I embrace AI to help turn large volumes of content into digestible insights – something that’s encouraged at Flow Communications, where we approach AI as a tool to enhance, not replace, our human creativity and strategic thinking. My former approach – trying to monitor everything – wasn’t just inefficient; it was impossible
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Ditch the “always-on” approach to information: I have carved out specific periods and dedicated them to particular tasks – including researching trends. I’ve replaced constant checking with a dedicated 30-minute period in the morning before our company’s daily stand-up and at midday.
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I’ve established clear criteria for what deserves my attention: does this development affect my work? Is it gaining traction across multiple trusted sources? Does it solve a real problem rather than creating a new one? If the answer to all three is yes, I’ll explore it further. Otherwise, I’m comfortable letting it go.
This approach isn’t about ignoring trends – it’s about recognising that attention is your scarcest resource and allocating it with intention.
Unhealthy consumption habits
The pressure to stay constantly informed is impractical. In most professional contexts, being a day or even a week “behind” on trends rarely has significant negative consequences – yet the anxiety of potentially missing something important drives us to unhealthy consumption habits.
I’ve found peace in accepting that I’ll never know everything. But none of us will.. In a world obsessed with more – more information, more content, more updates – the professional value we bring isn’t in having encountered every piece of information first; it’s in our ability to contextualise, analyse and apply the right insights at the right time.
Thelma Ngoma-Mavhunga is a content producer (writer) at Flow Communications, one of South Africa’s leading marketing and communications agencies. Founded in 2005 in a small spare bedroom, Flow is now a multi-award-winning agency. For more information, visit www.flowsa.com. You can also follow Flow on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or on Instagram.
