Emphasizing the role of engineers and technical communicators, the book discusses the root causes and costs of information overload within organizations and introduces strategies and proven techniques for reducing information overload and minimizing its negative impact. It offers a theoretical framework and ideas for future research, and features special chapter ‘insight boxes’ that recount different approaches to problems from various multinational corporations.

Think you’re a good multitasker? Know someone who thinks they are? Here’s your chance to put your skills to this test! In this video, Dave Crenshaw walks you through the multitasking exercise he shares in his live keynote speeches and workshops.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

One in four of over 1,300 managers surveyed, admitted to actually suffering ill health as a result of the amount of information they handle.

Launching satellites into deep space won’t tell us much about our universe if we can’t efficiently retrieve information, according to a team of Australian and American researchers.

Here are some ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ pointers to help ‘Web 2.0 laggards’ pull their heads out of the ground and off-load the stress of information overload.

The symptoms of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder seem to describe half the people in New York City: restlessness, impatience, impulsivity, procrastination, chronic lateness, and difficulty getting organized, focusing and finishing tasks.

How do you know you have ADHD, which experts compare to having a mind like a pinball, with thoughts flitting in multiple directions. Maybe you’re just overcaffeinated and overworked? And if you do have it, will there be a stigma? Should you try medication? Will it work?

Unnecessary interruptions cost U.S. businesses $588 billion per year according to research conducted Basex. Such interruptions come from many sources, including instant messaging, spam e-mail, telephone calls, and the Web.

“The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity” is the first in-depth look at a problem that results in 28 billion lost man-hours per annum in the United States. Technology promised to make workers more efficient, but it has the potential to cost companies billions unnecessarily. Basex surveyed over 1000 executives and knowledge workers to find out how interruptions impact their work and what they do to counter the impact of unnecessary interruptions. (more…)

A while back I wrote about our “First Generation” solutions to Infomania: those based on training people to adopt voluntary behavior change. And I told you that our experience is that their effect always lasts a year or two and then diminishes as people come and go and memories fade; then you re-launch the training to gain another year, and so on… Admittedly these programs are inexpensive to run, so this is acceptable; still, last year I finally got tired of this repetition and decided to try and devise something completely different – solutions that would be less voluntary and more aggressive in stopping the barrage of email and interruptions.

These are now being developed for deployment later this year.

IBM Lotus has every intention of using Britney Spears. Not as a spokesperson, for God sakes, but as an example. Spears dominates the social networking phenomenon like Big Blue wishes it could. Specifically, Lotus wants to apply social networking to business processes and team collaboration efforts. Not that Britney doesn’t mean business, but IBM has very different ideas about putting social networking tools into the hands of business professionals in organizations around the world.