The desire to “Be in the Know” has no doubt been around since our stone age ancestors had developed language. In addition to the actual value of the information, it meant being close to the seat of power, to where the decisions of the tribe or village or city-state were being made or influenced. It was a heady feeling and a powerful practical tool in social interactions; it could even be a survival skill.

Unfortunately, this desire to share in the flow of information has taken a nasty turn when Information Overload came around. It used to be that in order to know what’s going on you had to connect – socialize – gossip – with the right people; a few would suffice, and you’d get the benefits of the social interaction to boot. Today, we have email and the ‘net, where the available information is infinite, and most of the information is useless to you. Nevertheless, people retain that urge to know as much as possible, and they keep scanning the stream of messages and updates to the exclusion of real human interaction and useful work.

Consider this manager I was interviewing about his email load a while back. I inquired about a given message in his Inbox, and the guy told me it arrives, regular as clockwork, every week. When I pressed for details I was told that the man never read it, not once. Why not get off the distribution, then, I asked – and the indignant reply was “You want me to lose important information?!” The manager didn’t even perceive the absurdity of the situation: the desire to be in the loop, to receive all the information flowing in the organization, was strong enough to blind him to the fact that he had no time for it anyway.

It takes a good deal of willpower to avoid this trap and let go of a large portion of the information one can access. Being in the know is useful when the know is of significance; otherwise it can just add to the clutter and waste inherent in information overload. How about you – are you trying to bite more of the “know” than you can swallow?