In the film Her majesty Mrs. Brown, we see a grieving Queen Victoria refusing to return to her duties in the years following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. The film has much else to recommend it, but as an Information Overload practitioner I couldn’t help but enjoy the moment when the Queen – played by Dame Judi Dench – angrily exclaims “my ministers send me letters to read – boxes and boxes of letters!“

This was before email, before Facebook, before our BlackBerry-distracted modern existence; and yet even then Management involved Information Overload – and even then, senior managers took a major share of this problem. Even the mightiest manager of the land, describing the tedium and stress of her royal job, saw the “boxes and boxes” of messages (and, naturally, the tasks they embodied) as a major affliction.

Sure, it’s only a movie… but it managed to capture the moment quite well!  🙂