The average knowledge worker processes 174 newspapers of information a day#
That figure comes from Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar, an expert on choice and decision-making, and it is meant to be jarring. It is not that anyone reads 174 newspapers. It is that between emails, messages, meeting notes, dashboards, and notifications, the daily volume of information a typical knowledge worker has to consciously or subconsciously process is roughly equivalent to that much text.
Nobody's brain was built for that, and the data on what it does to focus, decisions, and output backs that up.
The scale of the problem, in numbers#
Volume is rising, and people notice. A Gartner survey of nearly 1,000 employees and managers, reported by Harvard Business Review, found that 38 percent of employees say they receive an excessive volume of communications at their organization. Only 13 percent said they received less information than the year before, meaning for the overwhelming majority, the trend only moves one direction.
Interruptions are frequent, and recovery is slow. Research associated with Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied attention and interruption for over a decade, is widely cited for two figures: workers get interrupted roughly every few minutes by emails, messages, or notifications, and it takes over 23 minutes on average to fully regain focus after a significant interruption. Multitasking and constant context switching compound the problem. Estimates commonly put the productivity cost of heavy multitasking at up to 40 percent, since the brain does not truly do two cognitively demanding things at once; it switches rapidly between them, paying a small cost every time.
This connects directly to the unread problem. If knowledge workers already spend close to 20 percent of the workweek just searching for and gathering information, per McKinsey's benchmark research, and only 20 percent of employees worldwide are engaged at work, per Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, information overload is not a separate issue from disengagement and unread communications. It is very often the cause. People do not skip your update because they do not care. They skip it because forty other things are already competing for the same shrinking window of attention.
The cost you cannot see on a calendar#
The 23-minute recovery figure understates the problem, because it treats attention as something that returns fully once you sit back down. Research on what psychologists call attention residue suggests it does not.
When someone switches from one task to another, part of their attention stays behind on the unfinished first task. They are physically working on the second thing while a fraction of their cognitive capacity is still occupied by the first. That residue is why a day of constant switching feels exhausting despite producing little, and why the tenth interruption costs more than the first.
Applied to communication, this means the damage of an unnecessary message is not the thirty seconds it takes to read. It is the residue it leaves in the work it interrupted. A person pulled out of focused work by a low-value all-company announcement pays for that announcement across the following twenty minutes, and you never see that cost in any metric you report on.
This is also why volume reduction beats volume optimization. A shorter, better-written unnecessary message still interrupts.
Why this keeps getting worse, not better#
New collaboration tools were supposed to fix this. In practice, most organizations added Slack, Teams, or an internal wiki on top of email rather than instead of it, which multiplied the number of channels demanding attention rather than consolidating them. Iyengar's research points at a related root cause: most people have not built a filter for deciding what is actually worth their time versus what merely arrived in their inbox. Every new tool becomes another place messages can land, and without a clear filter, all of them get treated as equally urgent.
The result is what researchers sometimes describe as an attention economy problem playing out inside a single company. Departments and leaders are all competing for the same finite hours in an employee's day, using more channels than ever to do it. Nobody intends to overload anyone. It happens anyway, one Slack channel and one all-hands recap at a time.
The reason nobody fixes it#
There is a structural explanation for why overload persists in organisations full of intelligent people who all agree it is a problem, and it is worth naming because it changes what a solution has to look like.
Sending is cheap for the sender and expensive for everyone else. A department head who sends a company-wide update pays a few minutes of drafting. The cost is paid by several hundred people, in fragments too small for any of them to complain about individually. Every sender is making a locally rational decision. The aggregate is irrational.
Worse, the incentives run the wrong way. A team that communicates less looks less visible, and visibility is often how internal teams demonstrate value. Nobody gets credit for the update they decided not to send.
This is why individual advice, be more selective, protect your calendar, turn off notifications, only ever helps the individual following it. It does nothing about the volume arriving. Organisation-level overload needs an organisation-level constraint: a decision about what does and does not warrant a company-wide message, made once and enforced, rather than left to each sender's judgment about their own importance.
What actually helps#
Iyengar's research, summarized in a Slack-published breakdown of her work, points to a few concrete habits that hold up:
Be selective on purpose. People who manage information well regularly ask whether something is worth their time or should be delegated or skipped, rather than treating every incoming item as equally urgent. Without that filter, the natural response to overload is to react to whatever arrived most recently, which is the opposite of prioritization.
Reduce the number of places information can land. Every additional channel is another thing to check. Consolidating updates into fewer, more predictable places reduces the constant low-grade vigilance that scattered channels create.
Protect blocks of uninterrupted time. Given that refocusing after an interruption takes over 20 minutes on average, even a few uninterrupted 30-minute blocks a day meaningfully outperform a day fragmented by constant checking.
Match the format to how the information will actually get used. This is the one most communication advice skips. A quick heads-up belongs in a one-line message. A nuanced update that people need to actually absorb, not just acknowledge, competes far better for attention in a format they can consume hands-free during a commute or a walk than as one more unread item sitting in an inbox next to 40 others. This is the practical version of the unread problem: the fix for overload is not usually to write a better email. It is often to stop adding to the pile in the same format everyone is already ignoring.
Reduce round-trips, not just volume. Overload is not only about how many messages arrive, it is also about how many times a single topic gets revisited because the first version was unclear or got skimmed. A format people actually finish the first time needs fewer follow-ups to clarify what got missed.
A communication audit you can run in an afternoon#
Most overload advice stays abstract. This is the concrete version, and it takes about half a day.
Step one: collect one week of outbound. Every company-wide or department-wide message sent in a normal week. Email, Slack announcements, intranet posts, calendar invites for optional sessions. Most teams are surprised by the total before they analyse anything.
Step two: sort each item into three buckets. Did this require action from the recipient? Did it require awareness only? Or did it exist mainly so the sender could demonstrate that something happened? The third bucket is usually larger than anyone expects and is pure cost.
Step three: check the reach numbers on each. Open rate, click rate, or completion where you have it. Anything with materially below-average engagement is a candidate for elimination rather than for a rewrite.
Step four: cut one recurring item permanently. Not pause, cut. The single most useful outcome of this exercise is retiring a standing newsletter or meeting that nobody engages with, because it buys back capacity for the things that matter and it signals that volume is being managed.
Step five: pick one survivor and change its format. Take the most important thing you send that people are not finishing, and deliver it in a way they can consume when reading is impossible. That is the test of whether format, rather than content, was the constraint.
What this means for how you communicate#
If you are the one sending the updates, the honest takeaway from this research is not to communicate less. Teams still need information to function. The takeaway is to be more deliberate about what gets sent, how often, and in what format, since every message you send is competing with roughly everything else described above. What that competition costs in missed projects and lost hours is covered in the real cost of unread internal communications, and the engagement side of the same problem is in why employees don't read company updates.
For anything that genuinely needs to reach people, not just be technically delivered, the format matters as much as the writing. That is a large part of why we built Step around turning dense documents into short, two-host conversational podcasts rather than more written pages: something people can absorb on a commute competes for a very different, and often more available, slice of attention than something else sitting unread in an inbox.
The evidence on what each format actually delivers in comprehension terms is covered in audio vs text: which drives better retention, including the cases where audio is the wrong answer.
FAQ#
How common is information overload in the workplace? Widely reported. A Gartner-based survey found 38 percent of employees describe their organization's communication volume as excessive, and only 13 percent said volume decreased year over year, meaning it is trending upward for most people.
How long does it take to refocus after a work interruption? Research associated with UC Irvine's Gloria Mark puts the average recovery time at over 23 minutes to fully regain focus after a significant interruption, which is part of why frequent context switching is so costly even when each individual interruption feels brief.
What is attention residue? It describes the finding that when you switch tasks, part of your attention stays behind on the unfinished previous task. It explains why a heavily interrupted day feels exhausting while producing little, and why the true cost of an unnecessary message is far larger than the time it takes to read.
What's the single most effective fix for information overload? There is no single fix, but the research points at deliberate filtering, consolidating channels, and matching format to how information will actually be used, rather than defaulting to more written pages and more channels. At an organisational level, an enforced rule about what warrants company-wide communication outperforms individual advice.
Why don't organisations solve information overload even when everyone agrees it's a problem? Because sending is cheap for the sender and expensive for everyone else, and the cost is spread thinly enough that nobody individually objects. Teams are also rarely rewarded for communicating less, since internal visibility is often how teams demonstrate value, so the incentives push toward more volume rather than less.
Does reducing message length fix overload? Only partially. A shorter unnecessary message still interrupts, and the interruption cost, including the attention residue left in whatever the person was doing, is usually larger than the reading time saved. Reducing the number of messages outperforms shortening them.
How many channels should an organisation use for internal communication? Fewer than most use. The specific number matters less than predictability: employees should know which channel carries which kind of information, so they are not maintaining low-grade vigilance across five places at once. Adding a tool without retiring one reliably makes overload worse.
Is information overload the same thing as the unread problem? They're closely related. Information overload describes why people's attention is already spoken for. The unread problem describes what happens next: content competing for that limited attention in a format people don't finish gets left unread, regardless of how well it was written.
How do you measure information overload in your own organisation? Audit one week of outbound company-wide communication, sort each item by whether it required action, awareness, or existed mainly to show activity, then check engagement figures against each. The third category plus anything with below-average engagement is your reduction target.
Does switching some communication to audio reduce overload? It can, because audio competes for time when reading is impossible rather than for the same crowded inbox minutes. It is not a fix on its own: adding an audio version of everything you already send increases volume. The benefit comes from moving important content into a format people will finish, not from producing more content.
Get more research like this#
This post is part of our ongoing series on why workplace content goes unread and what the evidence actually supports. Subscribe to get the next one, delivered as both a short read and a Sprep-generated audio version.
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