How to deal with information overload

It’s the end of another rewarding conference. This means organising business cards and reviewing all the sessions you’d have loved to attend but couldn’t. 

Looking at all the sessions offered is an incredibly exciting prospect at the start of the conference – but by the end of the event, it becomes a daunting one. Between doing the laundry before hopping on your fly-in or catching a red-eye flight back to your school and writing follow-up emails to your new and old friends, when do you have time to go through the slides of that really interesting 2pm session you missed out on two days ago? 

Or picture this scenario. You come across a really interesting in-depth research report that would help you understand important big-picture trends, but you have back-to-back meetings scheduled, starting from 9am until 1pm. So you put it on the to-read list – which keeps on growing.

As a college counsellor, you need to love learning and reading, as it’s an integral part of the job. After you’ve gathered the basics of the major application systems and standard college-counselling procedures, you can always implement or innovate a new system – which involves educating yourself to ensure its effectiveness. 

So much to learn – so little time

The industry and admissions landscapes are evolving constantly and there are so many universities and regional systems to learn about, on top of the numerous professional-development opportunities. 

Beyond these structured courses, much of our learning is conducted through reading valuable resources and conference session materials. But there are a lot of them out there. 

This has been my conundrum ever since I started out as a college counsellor. My starting point was: “I should know all this to be able to help my students effectively.” Or, more accurately, “I would like to know all this, but there’s hardly enough time.” 

Recently, I got an insight about how to resolve this issue while reading Oliver Burkeman’s book Meditations for Mortals – specifically, the chapter entitled “Too much information”. 

Here are some of my reflections on how to deal with information overload as a counsellor. 

How counsellors can deal with information overload

1. Accept you won’t ever read everything

Accept the fact that you won’t know everything and won’t have the time to read all resources. 

We are finite beings. And there’s seemingly an infinite amount of information out there that we could consume, but we simply cannot. 

Accepting this fact is a helpful first step. Burkeman proposes a brilliant analogy: “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.” In essence, your backlog is not a container that fills up and we need to empty, but a stream that flows past us. We get to pick select items from this and not feel guilty for letting the others float by. Sage advice, not only professionally but personally in the age of digital torrents.

2. Strategise learning according to your needs 

After getting comfortable with your finitude, you can strategise your finite time effectively. You will always have some needs or goals that are more pressing than others, and your learning can naturally follow these. 

For instance, if you’re moving to a new school and it has a large Korean student population but only a couple of Europeans, then learning about the Korean university admissions system should be a key learning goal, as opposed to learning about the German system. 

Ucas is changing the structure of its personal statement, so this should likely be a learning goal for many counsellors, as the UK is always a popular destination in international schools. But if you have no students applying to the UK, you can learn about it later. 

3. Allocate time for reviewing resources 

I allocate an hour at the end of my day, when I’m too tired to create anything new, as my period for consuming knowledge. I either spend some time on whatever professional-development course I am undertaking, or read or watch a resource that’s been on my to-do list. Just going through one presentation slide and taking notes on it means I can go through at least three a week, even if I miss a couple of days. 

4. Make a to-do list of reading and watching resources

Creating a separate to-do list of the things you should watch and read can help you tackle the learning at a structured way. Treat it as a task, just like any other. Checking off the resources you have consumed is a satisfying feeling – and you can track your learning in a visual way.

5. Print materials if possible

We all spend too much time on a screen. If a report or an admissions guide can be printed, then do yourself a service and print it. Print reading versus screen reading is a hot topic in psychological research. The research is admittedly mixed, but this study shows that print reading is linked with higher levels of perceived understanding, perceived confidence and perceived immersion and with lower levels of perceived fatigue. 

6. Prioritise and streamline your knowledge sources

There is a lot of information out there, some of which is vetted and others which are not. Luckily, there are trustworthy sources of knowledge. Newsletters from experts are also useful ways to consume bitesized pieces of knowledge on a regular basis. 

Trusted repositories of knowledge 

THE Counsellor

International ACAC Webinar Archives 

Marty Bennett’s LinkedIn All the SMIE News Fit to Share newsletter: student recruitment and global politics 

Lucy Sattler’s LinkedIn Pondering Careers newsletter: career advice

Jeff Neill’s Tech-Neill-ogy newsletter: AI 

College counselling involves a great deal of learning, which can be overwhelming. There’s no need to overwhelm yourself further with feelings of guilt for not being able to learn or know everything. Our role is not to be an immediate and instant expert – but it is to be there for our students and learn alongside about how to help them best, at that moment.