What follows is approach/terminal and tower based, and should not be seen as contradicting Tarq's advice for area/enroute.
Purely on the subject of overload....
It's probably easier to spot in others than in yourself!. The outward signs tend to be a rise in vocal volume, faster speech, saying "correction" a lot and losing the ability to notice things like someone trying to co-ordinate with you.
In yourself, try to aware of the point at which you no longer know what all your aircraft are doing
without needing to look at your strips. I realise this may seem counterintuitive given this is a discussion of using strips appropriately, but read on.
At that point, and hopefully not later, take a breath and slow everything down. If anyone else joins the frequency, and if it's safe to do so, tell them to stand by (then they hopefully won't bug you with a second or third call). Have a scan of the
whole screen, to ensure there are no conflicts that need to be sorted out RFN. Then go through your strips in a logical order, say from the bottom up for arrivals. Read the strip marking for what is actually essential, which is usually callsign, altitude, heading and speed. Maybe also the vortex wake catagory. Look back to the screen in the immediate vacinity of that aircraft, and see if anything needs to be done now and try to store in your active memory what will need to be done soon, i.e. transfer to tower after your next two transmissions. If you can, take another general scan and then go to the next strip. Again, take in what is essential, look back to the screen where that aircraft is, and again take a general scan once you're done with aircraft #2. And so on.
While you're doing the above, if you need to issue any instructions it is helpful to consciously slow down your speech delivery. A "say again" is not useful at this point. Injecting an extra tone of seriousness into your voice may also help reduce the "say again"s and unnecessary requests!
This reminds me of training in tower, with 3 runways and lots of VFRs, while just coming up to first validation. My strips saved me, not to mention the travelling public, during an unusually busy session. I told the OJTI afterwards that I'd have sunk without the strips, and he said something along the lines of "I know, and I'm glad you had that experience."
If you haven't already heard a million times that it's different in the real world than in the college, you soon will. It's true too, but the college experience is still useful, and the sooner you learn the techniques that will allow you to dig yourself out of a hole the better. It also makes you less likely to dig those holes in the first place.
