Wed 19 Oct 2011
Take Action on Information Overload Awareness Day — October 20, 2011
Posted by admin under enterprise software
[2] Comments
For the last three years, our friends at Basex have marked October 20 on the calendar “Information Overload Awareness Day,” a day to draw attention to the the consequences — both financial and personal — of living in a world with more information than we can consume, assess and put into action.
I hazard to guess that you are all too aware of information overload in your personal and professional lives. What you may not be aware of, however, are the exorbitant business costs in time and money of information overload and the wasted efforts of the information workers who arm people with the most recent and relevant information to drive business results. What’s more, you should know that we now have the technology and proven processes to deal with this problem better than we ever have before. But first, let’s dive into the financial impact of accepting the status quo and resigning ourselves to live uncomfortably in a digital landfill.
In Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization, Jonathan Spira, CEO and chief analyst at Basex, offers these staggering stats to illustrate the impact of what boils down to, in my humble opinion, inefficient communication practices and tools.
Fast Stats from Overload!
- A minimum of 28 billion hours is lost each year to Information Overload in the United States.
- Reading and processing just 100 e-mail messages can occupy over half of a worker’s day.
- It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30-second interruption.
- For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an e-mail, eight hours are lost.
- 58 percent of government workers spend half the workday filing, deleting, or sorting information, at an annual cost of almost $31 billion dollars.
- 66 percent of knowledge workers feel they don’t have enough time to get all of their work done.
- 94 percent of those surveyed have felt overwhelmed by information at some point to the point of incapacitation.
As you digest these data points, remember, there is actually something you can do to reduce the personal and business impact of information overload. And it starts with giving yourself a moment to think before you act.
In addition to the Basex challenge to think before you send in an effort to get people to send 10% fewer e-mail messages, starting October 20th (or sooner!), I would also suggest taking a broader look at the problem beyond email to assess your ability to have an even greater impact.
In addition to the use, and some say overuse, of existing communication tools such as email, information overload also reflects a missing set of technology-enabled processes to organize, filter, and intelligently deliver relevant information and knowledge to the individuals who need it.
You can get greater context from Attensa here, and in the Attensa White paper Reducing Information Overload in the Enterprise, but the bottom line is: You can lessen the impact of information overload and at the same time take advantage of the plethora of information available on the topics you need to follow by using the right tools.
This week and in the weeks to follow, decide that information overload is a problem that you can no longer accept and seek out the people, processes and technologies that can help you do something about it.
Here’s what we are doing at Attensa. If you like what you see and want to learn more, let me know.
April 4th, 2012 at 7:41 pm
WHAT IF INFORMATION OVERLOAD DOES NOT EXIST?
The core assumption behind information overload is that the information we want is the same as the information we need or like. Therefore, we cannot with good reason cut back on the information we want, because it reflects stuff that is important to us. Hence, thanks to the web we are overloaded with needed information that we can’t help wanting. However, from the perspective of contemporary affective neuroscience, wanting and liking are NOT the same thing, and are governed by entirely different neural processes. Thus, what we want is different from what we need because wanting and liking represent distinctive neurological events. Therefore, the key underlying premise of information overload that everything we want is the same as everything we need is based on cognitive principles that have no basis in neural reality, and the concept of information overload must therefore be abandoned.
The linked article questions the concept of information overload by challenging this most elementary underlying assumption. Based on the work of the distinguished neuropsychologist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan (who also vetted and endorsed it), it is simple, short, and uses a Boston Red Sox title run to make its very radical point. Hope you ‘like’ it or at the very least the Red Sox!
http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2012/02/searching-for-red-stockings-myth-of.html
May 22nd, 2012 at 1:09 pm
Wow….talk about being late to respond. Sorry J. Marr. this is great. thanks for weighing in and I completely agree. I think Information Overload as a concept is a misnomer as well. If we need it and it’s relevant to the problems we are trying to solve, then it doesn’t in fact exist. It’s the infotainment sludge or opportunistic posts that don’t really map to solving problems that creates the deluge. Good show.