At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Sarah Chen found herself compulsively scrolling through social media feeds between hospital shifts. What started as professional diligence soon became an overwhelming digital flood.
“I couldn’t stop checking my phone,” she later told her colleagues. “Every notification felt urgent, every update seemed crucial. But the more information I consumed, the more anxious and exhausted I became.”
Chen’s experience is common. A study of 314 healthcare professionals showed that information overload led to “COVID-19 fatalism” – a feeling of helplessness that created a vicious cycle. The more information they consumed, the more emotionally drained they became.
Sometimes, having less information results in better outcomes.
What is information hoarding?
Information hoarding happens when we collect and store information without processing or using it. This behaviour often arises from the fear of missing out on important details or the belief that every piece of data might be useful in the future.
The ease of using digital tools has turned many of us into information hoarders. With just a few clicks, we can save countless articles, documents and files to our devices without considering their true value or utility. These habits quickly lead to cluttered workspaces, overwhelmed minds, and decreased productivity, as sorting through large volumes of information consumes time and energy.
There are various types of digital hoarders:
Why information hoarding is detrimental to your thinking
Information hoarding can significantly impair your thinking and decision-making abilities. It consumes your time and strains your mind, reducing your productivity and well-being.
Collecting information may seem like progress, but knowing about something is not the same as understanding something.
When digital systems overwhelm us with too much information, our minds struggle to keep up. Faced with this flood of information, we start hoarding, telling ourselves, “I’ll deal with this later.” However, “later” never comes, and the digital clutter piles up. It’s like constantly stuffing items into a closet with the intention of organizing it someday, but that day never arrives, leading to chaos.
The consequences of information hoarding
Procrastination
As a child, Tiago Forte received a LEGO set and dreamed of building a fantastic spaceship. He sorted each brick by size, colour, and function, thinking a perfect system would result in a perfect creation. Days turned into weeks as he refined his methods, sketched detailed plans, and envisioned the final masterpiece.
His focus on preparation consumed all his time. He focused so much on the details and the process of collecting the bricks that he never began constructing his spaceship.
This experience taught Tiago the value of balancing preparation with action, a lesson he later applied to his note-taking and personal knowledge management strategies.
“I never even attempted to build that spaceship. Never laid one brick atop another to test my vision and see what was possible,” Forte reflects. “I still feel a little sad to this day that I never gave it a shot. But that disappointment instilled in me a strong belief that preparation is often procrastination in disguise. The people who are going to thrive in this new world are those who know how to take a leap before they’re 100% prepared.”
Just like Tiago was preoccupied with finding the perfect LEGO bricks, we get caught up in collecting and organizing information, preventing us from focusing on more important tasks.
We mistake this endless collecting and researching for real progress, believing that we’re productive when we’re actually just avoiding the real work. Like a writer who spends months “researching” but never writes, or an entrepreneur who endlessly studies business plans but never launches, we use information gathering as a comfortable substitute for taking action.
Mental clutter
Information hoarding clouds our thinking and stifles creativity. Valuable book excerpts, memorable quotes, precious insights and resources get lost in a sea of trivial content.
Information hoarding is like overloading your bike. You struggle to pedal forward because you carry too much unnecessary weight. Too much collected, unprocessed information becomes an “attention tax,” draining mental energy and making it hard to focus on what truly matters and take meaningful action.
Missed opportunities
Hoarding information without engaging with it means losing the valuable insights hidden within. Storing a link or copying a quote seems like a quick way to capture knowledge, but the true value slips away without context and reflection.
When you don’t actively make sense of information, you lose the chance to grow. You passively consume instead of actively creating knowledge. To harness the information, you must explore the ideas, question assumptions, and form new understandings. This protects valuable insights and deepens your relationship with the information. Active engagement with information, not just collecting it, is essential for meaningful learning and retention.
How to overcome information hoarding
We fill hard drives with documents, clutter browsers with open tabs and bookmarks, and build digital libraries too extensive to read in a lifetime. Yet, most of this stored information remains unused.
The problem isn’t access to information. The problem is turning information into understanding.
1. Curate and filter ruthlessly
The volume of information available is growing exponentially, but our cognitive capacity remains unchanged. This makes it crucial to filter and curate information effectively. As Cal Newport points out, “The ability to select what matters in a world of infinite inputs may be the most important skill of all.”
Some key principles for better curation:
The skill of knowing what to ignore is as important as knowing what to keep. Clay Shirky captured it perfectly when he stated, “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
2. Transform information into knowledge
Engage with the information by asking questions, seeking answers, summarizing and providing specific examples and explanations. Writing demands clarity and precision. As cartoonist Guindon humorously noted, “Writing is nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is.” Document your understanding to clarify your thoughts.
Some techniques for converting information into knowledge:
Stop collecting and highlighting excessively, and start actively engaging with the information you encounter to create more meaningful value for yourself.
3. Improve your storage and retrieval system
Develop a system for organizing and retrieving your collected information effectively. Information is only useful if you can find it when you need it. Have a system in place, and the value will compound over time.
Most people collect insights passively. They read and notice one day and forget it the next. This passive consumption creates an illusion of knowing without any lasting impact.
As Bill Gates noted, “Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared.” By sharing your ideas and insights, you promote collaboration and growth. Think of knowledge as learning a foreign language. You don’t master it by learning individual words alone; immersion is the key. You need to experience the words used in context and communicate with others for things to click.
When you share knowledge, it multiplies. Don’t let your information gather digital dust. Put it into the world, engage with others, and observe how your understanding deepens through this exchange.
Bottom line
To overcome information hoarding, strike a balance between collecting information and applying it. Actively engage with the material, create effective systems for retrieving information, and transform information into actionable insights. This method allows you to filter out the noise and focus on what truly matters.
In the words of Oscar Wilde: “Nothing is easier than to accumulate facts, nothing is so hard as to use them.”
Resources
Forte Labs – About Tiago Forte (Website)