Avoiding “Information Overload” in Technology-Related Burnout

In Part 2 of this video, Psych Congress Steering Committee Member Steven Chan, MD, MBA, clinical assistant professor, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, continues his discussion on the role of technology on burnout.

Dr Chan discusses how to handle “information overload,” by organizing your inboxes, and using them as a tool to stay productive.

In the previous Part 1, Dr Chan gave tips on how to use technology as a tool to control burnout.

Read the Transcript:

Dr Chan:  Another question we have is about Inbox. "My inbox stresses me out. How do I handle the information overload?"

Great question, because I, too, have an overflowing inbox. I have not just one, but five at this point. Whether you're a clinician dealing with your hospital inbox from patient messages to dealing with your own administrative messages, you want to come up with a system to check all these different inboxes.

Inboxes don't necessarily have to be electronic. They can be things that are physical. You might have a physical inbox at work, a physical inbox at home, and even a physical inbox where you throw your keys when you get home or have other things within easy access.

Make a list of all the different inboxes in your life and find different time points to check them during the day. What overwhelms people often is having notifications and alerts on that tell you, "Hey, a message is in on this inbox." It can stress you out.

There are particular inboxes you can set up. For instance, I have one inbox for personal correspondence only. I have another email address for just mailing list announcements. Then, I have an email inbox for each group that I'm working with, whether it be with my employer, or my clinic, or my other research projects.

Those all help streamline a lot of the noise. When you're looking at these programs, they often come with ways to automate things. For instance, at work, I've set up hotkeys to allow me to move messages into folders as quick as possible.

With some of my personal email, sometimes I let the inbox flow through, but there are different programs that will filter it so you just see the last day, or the last two days, or the last seven days of messages.

It may take some experimentation. You can ask your friends. There are some coaches out there that talk about how to achieve productivity with different inboxes. It doesn't just extend to email inboxes, as I alluded to.

There's also social media inboxes, direct messages, and then all of the other social media networks that are out there, too. Setting up a schedule and a time and place where you're only checking it, say, once or twice a day can help go a long way towards reducing some of the nervousness that can come up with getting a ton of notifications and alerts.

The last question here I have is, "Where can people learn more about these techniques on productivity and success?"

I myself have given talks on this to mental health societies and also at Psych Congress. You can also check out my websites, stevenchanmd.com, as well as Mental Power Hacks, M-E-N-T-A-L, power hacks, H-A-C-K-S.

There's a lot of articles about not just streamlining the information overload, but also some slides I've presented in the past about how to streamline things like electronic health record system notes, how to streamline your ordering sets. These can be valuable to you.

Plus, if you have an IT team or some other technology team, they often have technology optimization courses that can help you get home on time so you're not having to stay late writing notes.

Great ways to beat burnout and improve your productivity, but also to achieve some more work-life balance.