Our friends at Basex have been talking to people about Info Overload for a long time, but for some months now they had the excellent idea of capturing what senior managers had to say about it on video. The outcome is a video that interviews execs in companies including IBM, NBC, RIM, and Siemens, who share their insights about the impact of IO.
Best of all, the folks at Basex shared it – “Information Overload – The Movie” is available to us all on YouTube and on the Basex blog.
I was looking at the interesting web site of Canadian SciFi author Robert J. Sawyer and found an article in which he discusses Multitasking, and views it quite positively. In fact he says “The complaints about multitasking are the last gasps of the couch-potato generation” – the new, “wired” generation will practice multitasking to great advantage.
My first reaction was of astonishment, since we at IORG all know the body of research that proves multitasking – the futile attempt to “do five things at once” – can reduce effectiveness, creativity, and so forth. On closer reading, however, it became clear that Sawyer has quite a different definition of “Multitasking” in mind. He refers to the ability of people to seek information from multiple sources, as when students stop listening to their teacher to browse the web, or SMS, or tweet, in class. You can read the article and form your opinion; in my case this started me thinking: how come the same word refers to “our” kind of multitasking – trying to respond to endless interruptions – and to Sawyer’s exuberant exploration of knowledge resources?
Leaving aside the fact that nobody really does multiple things at once, so it’s more a matter of time-slicing, I concluded that there is indeed good multitasking and bad multitasking: it’s good if the person chooses what and when to multitask on, and it’s destructive if the choice is forced by incoming, unsolicited interrupters. In Sawyer’s classroom example students go where they wish in knowledge space; in the typical workplace environment knowledge workers are endlessly forced to drop one thing to respond to another.
We all know those meetings where everyone is “doing email”; we know that this affects the attendees’ hearing – nobody listens. But there are cases where it also affects their speech, as transmitted to other attendees in a different location.
To see how, check this post on Commonsense Design, my other blog.
The other day I gave a lecture about Information Overload at a technology conference. Afterward a number of attendees approached me to discuss it. I asked one of them – himself employed at a technology company – whether the extent of the problem in his workplace was as bad as I described it in general, and he asserted that it certainly was; no surprise there. But then he remarked that although he lives with the problem every day, my lecture was the first time he gave thought to this matter from this interesting and different angle… he was referring to the manifold aspects of the impact on knowledge worker productivity, such as the longer time to execute tasks or the reduction in creativity engendered by constant interruptions.
This was a glimpse of a problem I think is fairly widespread – many organizations live with IO while being in a sort of denial about its impact on their actual business. Most everyone feels the immediate effect on their stress level and quality of life, but they don’t make the leap to realize that work output suffers as well.
I think that is one key area where we of the IORG can be of use – to raise awareness of what is really going on. If they don’t understand what it’s costing them, businesses will be unlikely to assign resources to fixing the IO problem!
What do you think?
IORG isn’t the only group of people interested in the problem of information overload. Here’s a glimpse at some of the other stuff going on in the IO world. On the academic side, a workshop on enhanced messaging was held at AAAI 2008 with a bunch of interesting presentations. In the media, there have been a flurry of articles revolving around the problem of information overload that I’ve been informally collecting on this FriendFeed page (where anyone is welcome to submit links and comments). We’re working on an updated and upgraded version of our IORG resource center to collect links to research papers, articles, and much more information around IO. And the business world is starting to take notice as well, with industry conferences like Defrag springing up to address IO topics (full disclosure – I’m speaking at Defrag and know the organizers). It’s great to see so much activity around this problem!
An interesting article in the BBC News magazine recently afforded us a rare glimpse into the problem as seen from the perspective of two politicians – no less than Barack Obama and British opposition leader David Cameron.
Personally I always thought that senior leaders of nations have licked Information Overload. After all, one can’t imagine that the President of the United States slaves for hours each day over a flooded email inbox… he must have a dozen aides summarizing the news and distilling for their chief a beautifully short list of what he really needs to know… (more…)
