Stop Fiddling With Your Phone and Go Offline: People Experiencing High Information Overload Have Sparse Online Sessions

People suffer from information overload while using digital devices, yet little is known about the interaction of the overload experiences and everyday web behavior. We conducted a large-scale longitudinal observational study (N=277) over seven months. The study combines over 13M passively observed web traces from desktop computers and mobile devices with four waves of surveys measuring the experienced information overload. Our results demonstrate that repetitive, short-duration use of devices (i.e., high sparseness) in online sessions differentiate highly overloaded individuals from others with a large effect. Furthermore, mobile web duration and session sparseness predict increase in the overload. Overall, our results highlight that the web usage duration, the temporal patterns of usage, and the choice of a device are associated with information overload. By highlighting session sparseness as an actionable behavioral signal, our results inform the development of digital well-being tools that nudge users toward healthier interaction patterns and reduce overload.