I have been reading a lot about information overload over the last couple of months. I posted about aspects of it in the past. A figure that is quoted from time to time is the cost to business resulting from the information overload suffered by their employees, and not surprisingly, a company has put a number on it (lies, lies and damned statistics aside, it makes for an interesting read.)
The information below was taken from a blog on the NYT. It refers to someone called Nathan Zeldes - a name that has also come up a couple of times in my reading on information overload - and I quoted him on this site in the past. I plan on posting more from him in the future.
The NYT post concludes with some tips on how you can change your behaviour to decrease e-mail related information overload, all good advice in my humble opinion - especially the last one.
Basex, a business research firm, came out this week with a twist on the usual year-end looking-back and looking-forward lists. The firm picked a “problem of the year” for 2008, information overload.
Basex specializes in studying how professionals and office workers — “knowledge workers” — do their work and use technology. It says the $650 billion figure is an estimate of the “cost of unnecessary interruptions” in terms of lost productivity and innovation. The number, notes Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst for Basex, is mainly an effort to put a size on what is a big and growing problem. After all, one person’s interruption is another’s collaboration.
Others are trying to measure it too. The Basex press release quotes Nathan Zeldes, an engineer at Intel who studies computing productivity issues, who said, “At Intel, we estimated the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week.”
Hardly a special case, Intel, Mr. Spira said in an interview, is “just being honest and up front about the problem,” and its efforts to address the issue are “receiving support at the very top of Intel.”
The information-overload toll is largely a byproduct of workers grappling with the growing tide of e-mail, instant messages, cellphone calls, wikis, blogs and the like.
Basex offers 10 tips to help manage information overload. The e-mail advice includes:
- “I will not e-mail someone and then two seconds later follow up with an IM or phone call.”
- “I will read my own e-mails before sending them to make sure they are comprehensible to others.”
- “I will not overburden colleagues with unnecessary e-mail, especially one word replies such as “Thanks!” or “Great!”, and will use “reply to all” only when absolutely necessary.”
“I will not overburden colleagues with unnecessary e-mail, especially one word replies such as “Thanks!” or “Great!”, and will use “reply to all” only when absolutely necessary.”
If one can break this one habit then this is the one to go for.... - there are a couple of places I would like to pin this up against.
Great- Thanks Alan..:)