Cognitive Overload - What Is It, Why It Matters To You and How To Manage It

dragosroua (74)in #life • 8 years ago

I’m going to tell you 5 words right now and please raise your hand if you know the meaning of any of them: cryptocurrency, resilience, cholesterol, pomodoro and proof of burn (this is not technically a word, it’s an expression, I know).

The first word and the last one are both from a field of life which should be familiar to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering being here. I know you know what a cryptocurrency is, but do you know what proof of burn is? Well, it’s a way of mining crypto by spending coins, not with your hardware (here’s a link if you’re curious). Resilience sounds interesting and you may have heard it a few times, and probably think it designates the ability to recover after a hard time. That is correct.

Cholesterol might also sounds familiar and you think it’s probably something in your body that must be kept low. And which McDonalds usually drives high. But you don’t know exactly what it is, do you? As for pomodoro, with all due respect, I think very few of you know what it means. It’s part of a productivity framework and, simply put, means a chunk of 20 minutes that you dedicate exclusively to a single task.

What’s common to all these words? They’re all parts of very narrow fields of knowledge. And yet, they’re penetrating our lives more and more every day.

The wave of incessant knowledge assaulting your cognitive field from very narrow niches is called cognitive overload.

And not only is this a real thing, but it’s also affecting our ability to get by in life.

Life, 5,000 Years Ago

Your ability to get by 5,000 years ago wasn’t as much related to what you knew to do, as it was related to compliance. The human societies were designed in such a way that they promoted the survival of the most compliant to the group rules and the demise of those who couldn’t comply. Although there were significant empires at that time, with quite elaborate management structures, you could safely think at them as being just oversized tribes, each protecting their kind in exchange of various level of compliance.

Also, your options were very limited, not only in terms of, let’s say, moving from one place to another, but also in occupational choices. You could have been an aristocrat, a merchant, a servant, a soldier, a carpenter, a priest or an artist. And maybe 5-6 other things. Compare that with the abundance of roles you can play in society today.

This abundance of choices and this flow of opportunities are very different from what it used to be 5,000 years ago. We have way, way, way more options. Switching from one job to another, or from one lifestyle to another is normal these days. Please keep in mind I make these comparisons with societies that existed 5,000 years ago, not with groups or experiments in the last 100, 200 years ago.

But this freedom of moving from one job to another or from one lifestyle to another came with a cost: the cognitive adaptation cost.

There is a learning curve in everything you do and if you want to acquire a new set of skills (to get a new type of job, or to generate income in a different way,) you need to go through the pain of this steep learning curve. On top of the skill related cost, there are also adaptation costs related to relationships, to trends or even to the results of elections every 4 years.

We need to learn continuously if we want to adapt. Compliance doesn’t guarantee survival these days, it just guarantees that you will continue to be alive. Tomorrow’s food and shelter is up to you.

And even if we’re not very much concerned with a specific lifestyle, even if we are satisfied with our current job or status, just being alive in this world puts a tremendous pressure on our cognitive system. There are new scientific discoveries every day, there are political changes, there are economical shifts and then, on top of them, there is this continuous overlapping of all these areas, which is generating even more information.

Your Daily Example: Steem

If you are reading this, you’re probably part of the platform. Or you want to become part of the platform.

If you’re in the platform for more than a few months, then you’re a veteran and you can safely skip to the next section.

But if you have only a few weeks or less, then probably Steem looks like a maze. There is this overload of technical terms: APR, SBD, Steem Power, reward pool, witness (that sounds like these guys knocking on your doors with Bibles, right?), wallets and whatnot. And then there is this social vocabulary: whales, dolphins, minnows (are you kidding me, minnows? A minnow that blogs?).

From all this maze you took the shortest definition that made sense for you, and that is probably that if you blog, you get paid.

But here’s the truth: if you don’t know how you get paid, why you get paid, from where the money comes you will never make enough. You may stay here for a few weeks and then drop it.

Introducing cognitive overload. That’s a very clear example that shows how proper management of cognitive overload dramatically improves your outcomes. The last paragraph will contain a very short explanation of the core terms in Steemit, just so you understand how you get paid, why you get paid and how to maximize your chances to succeed here.

I urge you to study those explanations by using the approach below.

Cognitive Overload Tamed In 3 Steps

Oh, how I love those titles: “Change your life in 5 easy steps”, “How to make delicious pizza with rose petals in 4 easy steps”, “Get back together with your ex in one beautiful and spectacular step”.

Not.

But that’s the truth: there are only 3 steps and they worked for me. So I will just use that title and move on. :)

**1 - Recalibrate Your Expectations **

Every time you enter a new field (being it a new job, a new lifestyle a new neighborhood) don’t put too much of an expectation on it. Whatever you expect out of it, it won’t happen instantly.

When I first joined Steemit, I was flabbergasted. I wanted to dive in full power, to conquer the world. Then I remembered the other 2,593 situations in my life when I did just that and it ended bad. Either got burned out, or bored.

So I decided to give it more time and to calibrate my efforts and implications. I started with a 30 days writing challenge. At the end of it, I had a much better idea about what Steemt is and how it can be useful to me, as a blogger and author.

2 - Focus On One Thing At A Time

Every new field of activity seems overwhelming in the beginning. Try to isolate one thing that seems to be the most important at the present moment and learn that one.

In my example, in the first month I focused extensively on writing and discovering the community within Steemit. Although I was very attracted to becoming a witness, just for the sake of the experiment, I postponed it until the second month.

With my expectations already set, I just gave it enough time and in the end I became witness. At the moment of writing this article I’m in the 50th position and you can vote for me here.

3 - Journal The Learning Experience

Whatever you do, try to keep a log of it. Journal the experience. Writing down everything you do has this quality of giving it weight and form.

I use such a system for many years now, so this time it was just a question of adding one more thing to it.

Unloading The Steemit Cognitive Overload

In just a few sentences, here’s what you can do here:

if you write, you may get paid, but only if other members are voting for your articles.
you will be paid in Steem, which is a cryptocurrency, meaning it can be freely moved over the internet and can be converted into fiat (normal) currency.
the votes you receive are allocating a part of a daily pool of rewards, based on how much influence the voter has in the platform - that’s from where your money comes.
the reward pool, at this moment, is created entirely by Steem inflation, which means every day there are “minted” (printed) around 46000 new tokens.
the voter also gets a part of the rewards pool, based on how much influence has in the platform
you can get influence by accumulating rewards or by buying Steem. In both cases, this influence must be “blocked” in the platform, it will not be liquid (can’t move it away). You will be able to deplete your influence account (yes, that’s Steem Power) only in a period of 3 months, in 13 equal payments, if you want.
the articles you write are not on a web server, they are pulled from a network of computers organized in a thing called blockchain - the same blockchain also handles all the coins related stuff.
this network is maintained by a few guys known as witnesses (they have to witness the fact the network is running or not). All of them are elected by casting votes, just like you vote for articles.
if you don’t write compelling content, you won’t get votes.
if you don’t brush your teeth, your breath will smell.
if you don’t wear sunscreen, you’ll get burned.

That’s pretty much it. Oh, and make sure you drink plenty of water.

image source - Pixabay

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.