Whew! Finished at last!…

As I mentioned in a post a few months ago, I’ve been hard at work writing an encyclopedic compilation of every solution I know to Information Overload, from software to training tools, from behavior change drives to personal strategies, from commercial products to innovative ideas.

This seemed to be a never ending task, with new solutions popping up all the time; I finally had to recall that wonderful adage, “In every project comes the moment to shoot the engineers and move into production”!

So, I arbitrarily closed the list and found that I have 164 solutions in it (and already one other has gone into a list I started for additions to the next release). These are classified in a taxonomy of 6 categories and 19 sub-categories, and are each presented with brief notes as to their benefits, risks, how to best apply them, and – where available – lessons learned by companies or individuals that had done so. All in all, quite a document – 120 pages of distilled information and insight. The process of assembling it was fascinating in itself, and taught me a lot about the software creation ecosystem, as I pointed out here.

A question of positioning

So now I faced the question of how to sell this information product. My original thought was to put it up for sale as a research white paper (think Gartner), which would mean a price that only people with a research budget – academics and industry practitioners – could afford. The document certainly has what that takes, in terms of the effort and value that went into it. Still, after some debate I decided to do the exact opposite: The Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions will be a popular guide, priced to be within easy reach not just of researchers but also of ordinary knowledge workers – anyone affected by information overload. Between selling at a high unit price for the few, or a low price for the many, I figured the second option has the benefit of serving the general good much better by helping more people recover their productivity and peace of mind.

Working out the details

What’s left to do, then, is to set up a shopping infrastructure on this site (which is quite easy in this day and age, but still requires some doing) and going live with it. I’m working on that; expect an announcement of The Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions sometime this month.

It is my hope that this work will be of use to all of you who struggle daily with information overload; to organizations willing to tackle the problem robbing their employees of their sanity and productivity; to business communicators facilitating such action; to researchers studying the fascinating field of communications technology and behavior; and to software vendors wishing to map the solution landscape. I can see all of these getting value and an interesting read from the fruit of my long effort.

Stay tuned!

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Announcing the Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions!