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Join us at the Information Overload Awareness Day event!

Posted on October 19, 2010 · Posted in Uncategorized

October 20 is Information Overload Awareness Day, and we’re holding an online event at 11 AM EDT / 3 PM GMT. Attendance is free if you pledge not to multitask during the event! Basex, who organize this event every year, secured an impressive lineup of academics, analysts and industry practitioners who will speak about IO and what they’re doing about it. Yours truly will speak too, as president of the Information Overload Research Group. Register to attend at http://bit.ly/dxpWGN (use code IORGGuest).

A good definition of Multitasking

Posted on October 13, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was lecturing about Information Overload and multitasking recently, and told my audience how the research data shows that trying to multitask makes you less efficient at each of the tasks you try to do in parallel. After the lecture, one attendee came up to me and gave me a lovely definition she had for Multitasking: Multitasking is a way to screw up a number of different things at once. I just had to share this gem with you! 

Data Glut: it isn’t only email…

Posted on October 7, 2010 · Posted in Uncategorized

I was reading an article about hi-tech airships in IEEE Spectrum when my eye caught in the sidebar a link to another article titled  The UAV Data Glut. What do you know – we thought Infoglut was a human problem, and now Unmanned Aerial Vehicles bitch about it too? Naahh… of course, it isn’t the UAVs that complain; it is humans, the only species that can. The problem, according to the article, is that the super sophisticated drone planes generate more data than humans can look at: “In 2009 alone, the U.S. Air Force shot 24 years’ worth of video.. Read more

The importance of Desktop Search

Posted on October 1, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

A manager recently described to me his system for handling his incoming email, which he viewed as quite inadequate. He would go through his voluminous new mail each day, then move it all to one folder. At least he wasn’t keeping it in the Inbox like the “I’ve got 6,000 messages in my Inbox” crowd; but his problem was that when he’d need to find a message again he often couldn’t. Some people solve the problem by maintaining a carefully defined folder hierarchy to archive old messages; for others, this just doesn’t match the way they work. But even if.. Read more

Information Overload before Email

Posted on September 23, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Real time communication over large distances has been around for millennia, if you count smoke signals and bonfire beacons; but it’s really taken off in the 19th century after the arrival of Morse’s Electric Telegraph in 1844. Suddenly it was possible to freely send text across the nation, and the new invention spread as fast as new wires could be strung up. Isn’t progress great? The transformation this brought to all aspects of life was sweeping, and is described in Tom Standage’s fascinating book “The Victorian Internet“. My favorite part of this book is the quote from a speech made.. Read more

The occupational hazards of handling information

Posted on September 17, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Handling stuff has always carried occupational health risks. Back in previous centuries it was physical stuff: if you worked in a coal mine your lungs would get shot; if you lifted product (“16 tons”), your back was at risk; if you dipped matches you’d be poisoned outright… and even dealing with books and ledgers involved the stereotypical “scholarly stoop” or myopic eyes. In this new century the stuff that matters is information, which is odorless, weightless, and non-toxic; you’d think there would be no hazards associated with its handling. And yet, there are distinct health issues related to Information Work… Read more

Is the brevity of SMS language compromising our emails?

Posted on September 12, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

An interesting observation in a client meeting: we were discussing the contribution of language gaps in a global company to email overload, and one participant pointed out that these days many younger employees use the super-abbreviated “SMS language” in their emails, leading to more misunderstood messages than in the past. Writing brief emails is not a new device; I notice it particularly among senior executives, who respond in one-liners and even in ALL CAPS to maintain communication despite the overload. These, however, tend to be older people and they write these brief emails in English. For instance, a baby boomer.. Read more

The collaboration-killing desk

Posted on September 7, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Collaboration is a crucial aspect of work in most hi-tech companies. Office cubicles, for better or worse, are also present in many of them. You’d think, therefore, that the latter would be designed to facilitate the former… No such luck, however. Consider the most common type of desk seen in the cube farms. Image courtesy GraceFamily, shared on flickr under CC license. The basic concept seems to make sense: the L-shaped desk, bridged at the angle by a diagonal area for the keyboard, allows one to sit facing the screen while having everything else – phone, file trays, drawers, and.. Read more

Five tactics to prevent your email from reaching the wrong eyes

Posted on September 3, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

In a previous post we saw that it’s all too easy for your email to find its way to people you hadn’t meant it for. So, what can you do when sending a sensitive message, to prevent such embarrassment (or worse)? Here are some tactics to consider: You can put in the message an explicit plea for discretion, such as “For your eyes only” or “DO NOT FORWARD”. You can also put “[Private]” in the subject, though that may draw the attention of hackers and people passing by an unlocked PC in the recipient’s absence. But of course, this is.. Read more

The problem of Self-induced Interruptions

Posted on August 29, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Recently I was talking to a senior manager about the role of BlackBerry alerts in information overload. The guy was quite aware of the impact, and told me he had turned off all incoming-email alerts on his device. Smart move! Then he added that this move had limited effect because he was in the habit of checking the BlackBerry for new email every few minutes anyway. This is a prime example of self-induced interruptions. People in this day and age are so addicted to the flow of messaging that even absent external interrupts they simply interrupt themselves. This was borne.. Read more