Being Overwhelmed

Feeling overwhelmed lately?

Recently, I started to feel quite overwhelmed with the knowledge that is everywhere.

LinkedIn, newsletters, mail, Instagram, just so much.

By the end of 2026, the world will generate somewhere around 221,000,000,000,000 GB of data in this year alone (IDC, via Statista, which puts the year in the 220-240 zettabyte range). A commonly repeated estimate puts what an individual takes in at around 100 GB a day.

I have 5 applications open, and 12 tabs open when I am writing this. The video is being encoded, I took some notes in Notion, WhatsApp stays open, etc.

We just do too much, we consume a lot of content, and the average connected adult is now online about 6 hours 40 minutes a day (DataReportal, 2026), roughly double where it sat in 2010.

We consume miles more than we create, so every reel, every post that we have read, stays inside our brain, occupying "a tab".

To stay focused, you have to minimize those tabs.

The thing is not all bad, though. We have the entire knowledge of the world in our palms. You can study anything, master any skill, reach out to anyone, something that was considered magic 100 years ago.

The problem is not information; the problem is switching between things. It takes around 20 minutes to properly focus on one thing, then a ding, a notification pops up, and you reply; the mental timer just resets once again.

The design patterns of modern interfaces are specifically intended to bypass conscious decision-making. You can scroll infinitely, and the content never ends.

Now, how do you use this to your advantage?

→Make it hard to consume things you do not want (see Minimize open tabs)

→Make it conscious when you do things

→Make other things (that you want to do) easier to do

Curious to know, did you feel overwhelmed lately?