Posts Tagged 'information overload'

Yes it IS Information Overload, Clay Shirky, not only Filter Failure

Posted on May 18th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

You can see it on Twitter every day, a year and a half after he coined it: Clay Shirky’s famous Filter Failure meme, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”. It’s catchy. It’s thought-provoking. And yet, I believe, it’s also misleading. This meme started with an excellent keynote Clay gave at Web 2.0 Expo NY in late 2008, and I strongly recommend you watch the video if you haven’t already: it’s very insightful and interesting. If you’re too overloaded to spend 23 minutes, some of the ideas are also in a CJR interview here. To sum it up, Clay says.. Read more

Collecting Manifestations of an Obsession

Posted on May 2nd, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Knowing my specialization in Information Overload, people around me tend to share stories from their own observations of people submitting to obsessive reading of email 24×7. For example: one friend reports being at an airport, seeing a family with young children waiting in line with their luggage on a cart. The mother was holding on to the cart, and trying to keep an eye on the kids. The father was banging on a Notebook doing email… (I can imagine that despite this fine proof of the feminine capacity for multitasking, his wife would have preferred to share the burden with.. Read more

Correspondence of yesteryear

Posted on April 27th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”. Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp.. Read more

Four ways to make Information Overload solutions acceptable to employees

Posted on March 3rd, 2010 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Solving Information Overload is one of the highest-ROI actions an enterprise can embark on. With knowledge workers losing about one day a week to this issue, anything that will reclaim them that time is bound to repay itself very rapidly for the company, while improving the victims’ quality of life. There’s just one potential pitfall: some of the organizational solutions available may seem restrictive or oppressive to at least some employees, and that may limit their success. It is important to make the solutions acceptable to the very people they are trying to help! Here are some ideas for achieving.. Read more

Information Overload: how do we quantify the cost?

Posted on February 26th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

We grown-ups like to quantify things in numbers, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry charmingly observes in The Little Prince: “If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!”” So, it is no wonder that any fighter against inefficiency in the workplace is often confronted.. Read more

How info-starved were our ancestors?

Posted on February 14th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is? First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of.. Read more

Stop hoarding information for a rainy day

Posted on December 29th, 2009 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Here’s a story from the early nineties, a time when much information in the workplace was stored and moved on sheets of mashed tree pulp. Back then I was doing research into Artificial Neural Networks, and my coworkers at Intel got into the habit of mailing me (in an inter-office envelope) a copy of any article on the subject that they came across. And I got into the habit of piling the articles at the corner of my desk, so that I might read them one day when I had the time. After all, they were articles in my field.. Read more

Email overload: snowflakes or terror birds?

Posted on December 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster. But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to.. Read more

Join us at the IORG Quarterly Event on Dec. 9!

Posted on December 3rd, 2009 · Posted in Uncategorized

The Information Overload Research Group’s Online Quarterly Event will take place on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 11:30 a.m. EST (16:30 GMT) The event is open to everyone interested in the topic of Information Overload (at no charge, of course). This will be a roundtable discussion around the topic “How Does Information Overload Impact You?” moderated by Jonathan Spira, IORG’s VP of research. He will be joined by Prof. Jonathan Ezor, director of the Institute for Business, Law and Technology at Touro. The format of the meeting gives attendees an opportunity to talk about the personal impact of Information Overload… Read more

The difference between Tips and Rules

Posted on November 17th, 2009 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

A common practice in companies that try to reduce information overload is to provide to employees guidelines promoting proper e-mail etiquette (where by etiquette I mean crafting messages to be less disruptive, and more beneficial, to others: “Write clear subject lines” is about etiquette; “only process email twice a day” is not). These guidelines, though usually not sufficient to solve the problem, are certainly a useful component in a solution program; but it’s important to be crystal clear about their classification: are they Tips or Rules? To illustrate: Tip: Make your messages as short as possible. Rule: No message in.. Read more