I’m overwhelmed with ideas from the Information Overload conference this week.  In an effort to reflect, I’ve listed some of the major stats and themes discussed for managing too much stuff.

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is “a group of industry practitioners, academic researchers, and consultants dedicated to reducing information overload, a problem which diminishes the productivity and quality of life of knowledge workers worldwide.”  If you’ve spent even five minutes reading this blog, you can guess why I quickly joined their ranks.

The conference involved a dinner gala, speaker panels, and lots of lively discussion.  Attendees came from all over the world, and comprised authors, professors, managers within big industry, and those trying to solve information overload problems with software. The following are some of the major themes and data points.

Some Scary Stats

• $650 billion is the annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States (Jonathan Spira, Basex)
• 28% of a worker’s time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important  (Spira)
• About 12% of the average worker’s time is spent thinking or reflecting (Spira)
• Email is not increasing linearly but exponentially (Spira)
• About 6 hours per week are lost due to context switching (multitasking, pausing, etc).  This is a widely regarded number, but was confirmed at Intel (Nathan Zeldes, Intel)
• At Intel, the average employee receives 350 messages per week (Zeldes)
• At Intel, the average executive receives over 300 messages per day (Zeldes)
• At Intel, employees spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email (Zeldes)
• At Morgan Stanley, the average employee receives 625 messages per week (Max Christoff, Morgan Stanley)
• At Morgan Stanley, the average executive receives 500-600 messages per day (Christoff)

Historical / Almost Historical

• 2001 was the first year that the knowledge economy overtook the industrial economy in terms of our gross economic output (I need to get an accurate quote on this, it’s also from Spira, I think)
• Since the 18th century we were of the mindset “better, faster, sooner.”  But something strange happened in the 1920’s: we began to produce more than we needed.  And thus advertising really entered the picture.  Both the products we didn’t need and the new information being broadcast to us are noteworthy landmarks in our path toward information overload (David Levy, University of Washington)
• With real carbon copies you could get 3 maybe 4 carbon copies in a typewriter.  Now you can easily CC 2500 people.  That’s a problem.  (Spira)
• The sense of urgency and importance of our own needs has increased greatly—causing us to interrupt people more.  Perhaps this began in 1973 when Fedex first made overnight delivery possible (Spira)

Quotables

• “We have met the enemy and he is us” – we like to switch tasks frequently, which is perhaps our biggest weakness (Spira)
• “Email is like Tetris.  As soon as you line up the boxes, more come down.” (Spira)
• One of the problems with spending time thinking is that it doesn’t look like you’re doing any work (Levy)

Solutions

• Understand the tools you have, use just a few of them, and don’t switch tasks so often (Spira)
• Managers need to focus on process, manage delicately, and set clear objectives (Spira)
• Raise awareness of the problem of information overload (Spira, Levy, Hurst). Aside: knowing is not half the battle, but it’s a huge first step
• A gulf which needs to be bridged is how technology vendors think people use their products versus how the product is actually used (Spira)
• Some of the common ways knowledge workers avoid interruptions include going to distant cafes, working from home, showing up before others arrive, or going to conference rooms (and pulling the shades) (Spira)
• We have so many more tools and so much more data…but spend MUCH less time thinking about it.  As such, we should seriously consider surrounding ourselves in both contemplative physical and online environments…and try harder to introduce contemplative practices into education (Levy)
• Training is a serious need (Hurst, others).  A big first step may just be explaining how and when to use Reply-Alls
• If people just understood how to separate their Inbox from their To Do list, that would also be a major first step (Mark Hurst, Good Experience / author of Bit Literacy)
• For Intel, part of their “first generation approach” was a great deal of training about email.  To help make this training stick, they developed an “Intel Email Effectiveness Coach,” which is a software program that warns people when they’re about to do something stupid, like send a message to 2000 people (Zeldes)
• For Intel, a “second generation approach” was having quiet periods, often of 4 hours, twice per week, where essentially people would disconnect from communication like email and phone (Zeldes)

General Points

• Most people’s approach to dealing with more information is an incremental one: work harder, catch up on the weekend, etc…but there has become too much data to just accept it all.  You have to “let the bits go.”  (Hurst)
• The competitive advantage we gained from getting more information faster is starting to disappear; now it’s how to get more relevant information (Christoff)

Software

There were a number of sofware solutions to information overload discussed.  Some of the ones that stood out in my mind include:

• RescueTime – keeps track of not just your activities on your computer but those of your office mates, enabling you to see how you stack up and when you’re slacking
• Slife – similar to RescueTime in that it gathers statistics about computer usage, but data is primarily kept locally rather than “in the cloud”
• SmartDesktop – So imagine your computer knew what was contextually relevant no matter what you were doing on it.  Yeah, they’ve got that covered. (Private Beta)
• Seriosity – an economics-based approach to email management whereby one attaches virtual currency to their messages
• ActionBase – Turns Outlook into a database of sorts for knowledge management and wiki-like email correspondence
• Talk2Us – a crazy voice recognition manage-your-life software that’s in private beta
• ClearContext – Helps you to better identify important information, group relevant items together, and generally have a better workflow within Outlook
• Permessa –Enterprise unified messaging for performance and compliance monitoring

Conclusions

IORG is a group to watch, and one that I’ll happily stay involved with.  I know I have a long way to go before I can completely understand the needs of my team and my clients, but I’ll be working with the people I met and trying to utilize many of the tips and applications above.

Any other good solutions to Information Overload?  Did I miss something at this event that  you’d like to share?

Filed under: Business, Productivity, Technology

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