And another new blog… like a newborn baby: you have high hopes for it, but you can’t really imagine what it will turn out like. You just have to nurture it as best you can, then wait and see.

This one is dedicated to the big passion of my interesting career… solving the problem of Information Overload, a.k.a. Infomania or Infoglut. It is an area I’ve been active in since Intel’s switch from VAX terminals to IBM PC’s in the mid-Nineties, which enabled Email Overload to explode in our faces. I had just invented my job as Computing Productivity Manager, and I may very well have been the first person in the corporate world to identify Email Overload as a major issue and to do something about it at an organizational level.

Over the years I’ve developed and deployed a variety of solutions at Intel and beyond, including behavior change drives, training programs and software tools. Because I like interacting across boundaries, I formed relationships and knowledge exchanges with other researchers and practitioners across the planet, in industry and academia, leading eventually to the founding of the Information Overload Research Group of which I am now the president. Over the years I’ve learned much about the problem, its interesting causes, its impact and the way it may be addressed; also what does and what doesn’t work, and what the critical success factors are. More than enough raw material for a blog, and more keeps coming in as the world begins to awaken to the need to improve a situation that has become nearly impossible.

My plan is to focus this blog on the aspect of IO that I’m most involved in: the combination of Email Overload and Interruptions that is impacting productivity and quality of life in organizations. There are other aspects of IO that I may touch on occasionally, but less often. However, it will come as no surprise to those who know my non-linear thought process that I will also address other aspects of knowledge work in general, and will enjoy the occasional off-topic foray when something catches my fancy. After all, that’s the wonderful freedom of blogging: my blog, my choice…

I hope you, my readers, will find all this sufficiently interesting to join the conversation, making this a two-way – heck, a multi-way – conversation. Welcome to my blog!