Information overload is visible in both work and everyday decision-making. In a 2023 survey, 68% of workers said they lacked enough uninterrupted focus time, while 62% struggled to spend too much time searching for information. News overload is also widespread: 40% of respondents across markets said they sometimes or often avoided the news in 2025, compared with 29% in the 2017 baseline. Together, these figures show that the problem is not simply the amount of information available, but the time, attention, relevance, and trust required to use it.
Contents
- Workplace time and attention costs
- Meetings, communication, and app switching
- How common is news avoidance?
- Why people avoid overloaded news
- Relevance and confidence in decisions
- AI and summarization as responses
Workplace time and attention costs
The 2023 Work Trend Index found that information work consumed a large share of employees’ working activity. Microsoft 365 activity showed employees spending 57% of their time communicating and 43% creating during a rolling 28-day period ending in March 2023. Communication includes the stream of messages, meetings, and other exchanges that compete with time for focused creation. (Source: 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report, rolling 28-day period ending March 2023.)
The same report measured specific pressure points among the heaviest users. The heaviest quarter of email users spent an average of 8.8 hours per week on email, while the heaviest quarter of meeting users spent an average of 7.5 hours per week in meetings. These are averages for the highest-use quarters, not estimates for every worker, so they describe concentrated exposure rather than a universal schedule.
Workers also reported the consequences of that environment:
- 68% said they lacked enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday.
- 62% said they struggled with spending too much time searching for information at work.
- 49% said they were worried that AI would replace their jobs.
The results suggest a practical decision-making problem: people may have access to more material while having less time to identify what matters. Searching, sorting, and recovering context can become part of the work itself. The 2023 survey did not establish that information overload caused every reported difficulty, but the figures identify where attention is being consumed.
The report also showed willingness to use automation against that pressure. In the 2023 survey, 70% of workers said they would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen workloads. Asked about specific uses, 86% said they would be comfortable using AI to find needed information and answers, 80% to summarize meetings and action items, and 76% for administrative tasks. Those responses show stronger comfort with information-handling assistance than with the broader fear captured by the 49% job-replacement figure.
Meetings, communication, and app switching
Meetings are a prominent source of information loss as well as information volume. In the 2023 Work Trend Index survey, 58% of workers said brainstorming in a virtual meeting was difficult, and 57% said it was difficult to catch up when joining a meeting late. At the end of meetings, 55% said next steps were unclear, while 56% said summarizing what happened was difficult. Only 35% thought they would be missed in most of their meetings.
Meeting demand had also expanded. Teams meetings and calls per week were 192% higher in 2023 than in February 2020. The comparison describes a change from February 2020 to 2023; it is not a forecast or a claim that every individual experienced the same increase. (Source: 2023 Work Trend Index: Annual Report.)
The app environment adds another layer. A 2019 survey found that 76% of knowledge workers used more workplace apps than five years earlier. Among app users, 56% said constantly switching between apps and tools made work harder, and 68% said they spent at least 30 minutes per day toggling between workplace apps. (Source: The app era is here: Now to optimize for it, 2019 survey.)
| Workplace signal | Share or estimate | Measurement period |
|---|---|---|
| Workers lacking uninterrupted focus time | 68% | 2023 survey |
| Workers spending too much time searching for information | 62% | 2023 survey |
| App users spending at least 30 minutes daily toggling tools | 68% | 2019 survey |
| Teams meetings and calls change | 192% higher | February 2020 to 2023 |
An earlier Slack report estimated that the average knowledge worker processed information equivalent to 174 newspapers per day in 2019. This is a report estimate, not a direct count of newspapers read and not a current measurement. It is best used as an indicator of the scale of information processing, rather than as a precise individual workload. (Source: Introducing the Slack State of Work report, 2019 report estimate.)
How common is news avoidance?
News avoidance provides a large-scale measure of information fatigue. Across markets, 40% of respondents said they sometimes or often avoided the news in the 2025 Digital News Report. The global share was 29% in the 2017 baseline. A separate 2023 report placed the across-market figure at 36% for that year. These are survey results from different report years, not a single continuously measured panel.
Country results in the 2022 Digital News Report varied sharply. Greece and Turkey each recorded 57% of respondents saying they avoided the news. Brazil recorded 54%, and the United Kingdom 46%; in both Brazil and the United Kingdom, the 2022 level was described as double the 2017 level. Germany recorded 29% in 2022. Japan recorded 6% in the 2017 report. (Source: Overview and key findings of the 2022 Digital News Report, country surveys and stated comparison periods.)
| Market or comparison | News avoidance result | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Across markets | 40% | 2025 survey |
| Across markets | 36% | 2023 survey |
| Greece | 57% | 2022 survey |
| Turkey | 57% | 2022 survey |
| Brazil | 54% | 2022; double 2017 level |
| United Kingdom | 46% | 2022; double 2017 level |
| Germany | 29% | 2022 survey |
| Japan | 6% | 2017 survey |
The country differences caution against treating “news overload” as one universal experience. Political conditions, media systems, trust, and personal relevance may differ across markets, but the supplied survey figures quantify the variation without establishing which factor explains it.
Why people avoid overloaded news
The 2022 report asked news avoiders about their reasons. The most common response was the volume and subject matter of coverage: 43% said there was too much politics and COVID-19 coverage. Other responses focused on emotional cost, trust, and usefulness:
- 36% said news had a negative effect on their mood.
- 29% said they were worn out by the amount of news.
- 29% said they avoided news because it was untrustworthy or biased.
- 17% said news led to arguments they would rather avoid.
- 16% said there was nothing they could do with the information.
- 14% said they did not have enough time for news.
- 8% said news was too hard to understand.
These responses describe different forms of overload. Quantity is only one: people may also reject information because it feels emotionally costly, unreliable, irrelevant to action, or difficult to interpret. The responses are not mutually exclusive, so they should not be added together.
The experience also differed by country. In 2022, 55% of UK news avoiders said news negatively affected their mood, compared with 49% in the United States. About 15% of younger news avoiders in Australia, the United States, and Brazil said news was hard to follow. (Source for these results: Overview and key findings of the 2022 Digital News Report, 2022 survey.)
Relevance and confidence in decisions
U.S. adults’ answers in a Pew Research Center survey conducted December 8–14, 2025 show why information volume can become a decision-quality issue. Fifty-two percent said they were worn out by the amount of news available. Sixty-seven percent had ever stopped getting news from a specific source, and 60% had ever reduced the amount of news they get overall. (Source: Americans’ Complicated Relationship With News, December 8–14, 2025.)
Relevance was limited for many respondents: 48% said most news they encounter is not relevant to their lives, compared with 35% who said most is relevant. Only 9% said they follow the news solely because they enjoy it. Twenty-four percent said they follow it because they feel they should, while 51% said they follow it for a mix of enjoyment and obligation.
The same survey measured confidence and civic usefulness. Only 29% of U.S. adults were very confident they would know how to check a news story’s accuracy. At the same time, 78% said news helps them at least a little with voting decisions, including 40% who said it helps a lot. The combination matters: people can see news as useful for major decisions while remaining uncertain about how to verify it.
AI and summarization as responses
AI is being considered as a way to compress and organize information, but the survey results show a mixed expectation. In the 2025 Digital News Report, 27% of respondents said they would be interested in personalized summarized news articles, and 24% were interested in personalized translations. Respondents gave generative AI a +29 net score for making news cheaper to produce, +16 for making it more up to date, and +7 for making it easier to understand. The net score was −18 for making news more trustworthy. (Source: Overview and key findings of the 2025 Digital News Report, 2025 survey.)
Workplace adoption figures point in the same direction. One in four surveyed desk workers had tried AI tools for work by January 2024. Around 80% of surveyed desk workers who used AI or automation said it was already improving productivity, while 43% said they had received no organizational guidance on workplace AI use. (Source: New Slack research shows accelerating AI use and quantifies the “work of work”, January 2024 survey.)
The evidence supports a bounded interpretation. Summaries and search assistance may reduce the time required to find or process information, and workers report interest in those uses. However, the negative trust score for generative AI in news and the lack of organizational guidance among many desk workers show that compression alone does not resolve verification, relevance, or accountability. For decisions that depend on accuracy, a shorter answer still needs an identifiable source and a clear measurement period.