How to Use Your Phone to Deal With Information Overload

The phrase “information overload” was coined in 1970 and described a theoretical future problem. In 2026, it’s the daily lived experience of anyone with a smartphone. News from dozens of sources, emails, messaging app notifications, social media feeds, podcast back catalogues, newsletters, YouTube subscriptions — there is genuinely more information available than any human can process, and the systems most people have in place for managing it range from inadequate to nonexistent.

The solution isn’t to consume more efficiently — it’s to consume less and better.

The Unsubscribe Sprint

The starting point for most people is reducing incoming volume. Spend one hour going through all incoming information channels and eliminating what doesn’t serve you:

Email subscriptions: go through your inbox, unsubscribe from every newsletter and promotional email you scroll past without reading. If you haven’t read it in the last month, you won’t. Leave only the ones you actively value.

Social media follows: unfollow or mute accounts that consistently produce content that doesn’t inform or genuinely engage you. This includes accounts you follow for FOMO (fear of missing out) rather than actual interest.

Push notifications: audit every app’s notification permissions. Retain only notifications that require timely action. Disable news apps, social media alerts, promotional notifications, and anything that creates interruption without equivalent value.

News apps: if you have four or five news apps, consolidate to one you trust. The news is the same across all of them; having five sources doesn’t make you better informed, it makes you more anxious and more likely to see the same story five times with slightly different framings.

The Intentional Input System

After reducing volume, design what comes in deliberately:

One or two quality news sources, checked once daily rather than constantly. Financial Times, BBC, the Guardian, NPR — whatever is appropriate for you. Once per day is enough to stay informed; more than that is mostly repetition and anxiety.

Three to five newsletters from people you genuinely value and read consistently. Substack, email — format doesn’t matter. The criterion is whether you actually read them.

A curated podcast queue rather than subscriptions to dozens of shows you never have time for.

A dedicated “read later” space (Pocket or Instapaper) for longer articles you genuinely intend to read, with a weekly review rather than a queue that never gets processed.

The Processing Time

Information without processing time is noise. Build in deliberate reflection time — even ten minutes after consuming something significant — to think about what it means to you, whether it changes anything you believe, and what (if anything) you want to do with it.

This is unfashionable advice in a culture that prizes consumption speed. But a single well-processed insight is worth more than a hundred half-absorbed items that bounce off the surface and contribute to the vague sense of being busy-but-unproductive.

The News Diet Question

Some people find that significantly reducing news consumption (not eliminating — reducing) improves their mental wellbeing substantially without meaningfully affecting their actual ability to navigate the world. This is worth experimenting with.

If you’re consuming news primarily because you feel you should rather than because it’s genuinely useful to you, that’s worth examining. The news will still be there if you check once a day rather than twenty times. The news cycle moves faster than any individual’s ability to respond to it, and most news has no direct bearing on most people’s actual decisions.

The Right Amount

There’s no universal right amount of information to consume. What matters is whether your information diet supports your goals, values, and wellbeing, or whether it leaves you feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and less capable of focusing on what actually matters to your life. That question is worth asking honestly.

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