When we think about information overload, we quickly go to our inbox as a major source of mental clutter and stress. Not only is the number of e-mails in our inbox a source of pressure, but also the feeling that this pressure is caused externally by others: someone, somewhere sent us something that we now need to deal with. These […]

More so than usual as we exit 2020 and enter the new year most of us are looking forward to letting go and leaving behind anything that no longer serves our purpose. This may include physical stuff that we clean out of closets and drawers, digital information overload, and the clutter of thoughts stored in our mind. Clutter drains our […]

I recently completed the Berklee College “Music for Wellness” course on Coursera.  I learned how music can impact your mood, health and well- being. When we listen to music that we enjoy, we impact the brain in a positive way by releasing feel-good neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine.  Relaxing music can impact the parasympathetic nervous system and allow us to […]

Over the years I developed a communication mantra to keep things “Simple, Essential, and Consumable” in order to be more efficient and effective in communicating and achieving my objectives,  and to combat information overload.  Simply put, information communication should be: Simple – straightforward, uncomplicated, easy to understand Essential – absolutely necessary, extremely important Consumable – rich and engaging content that […]

Will WFH increase or decrease Information Overload? (m. bariff 9-14-20) Work From Home (WFH) was claimed to empower knowledge workers with more flexible work hours and improved productivity from elimination of travel to/from the office. Have you experienced these and more benefits? Consider these factors in your personal assessment: Have you established with peer workers a clearly communicated boundary for […]

   The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey  (2016) proposes that Productivity is a composite function of : attention, energy and time. Managing these carefully will enable working deliberately with intention all day. Working smarter in our Knowledge Economy prioritizes attention and energy over time. He recommends focusing on the most important and urgent tasks (ala Eisenhower 2X2 Matrix)–even to the […]

Distractions are a huge challenge in today’s “always on” environment, and a key source of “information overload”. In this post, we are going to learn a bit more about the different types of distractions, what they are, and how you can (hopefully) learn to reduce their impact on your personal productivity. There two key types of distractions: A) External Distractions […]

In this IORG Webcast, Lele Terenzani is discussing Notifications with Martin Bariff. They discuss notifications, our everyday stream of continuous beeps and information, and the impact of these into our Information Overload.  

Alan Earls [https://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/feature/Clutter-data-overload-put-dashboard-designs-on-path-to-failure] proposes 5 actions to reduce IO in dashboard design: 1. eliminate irrelevant content, 2. group content logically, not chaotically, 3. assure sufficient user needs input, 4. Let content, not technology be your dashboard design, and 5. consider appropriate access security for the content. Joshua Reynolds [https://marketingland.com/blinded-by-data-181971] further adds 3 new suggestions: 1. content should be KPI driven, […]

Herbert Simon (deceased) offered this insight: “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” You have this power if you are disciplined. Linda Stone (https://lindastone.net/2014/02/05/our-powerful-and-fragile-attention/) shared: “If we don’t consciously choose where we want to direct our attention, there will always […]

Difficult information access can result in IO. A study by Teleware (teleware.com) in UK of 2K employees distributed across industries, gender, age disclosed significant frustration from misplacing captured information. Impacts: 720 wasted time, 680 forgot captured information both resulting in reduced task effectiveness. Indeed 520 reported missing deadlines. Only 40% have a routine process to capture, record and retrieve desired […]

As a contribution to Mental Health Awareness Week, IORG steering team members Dr Monica Seeley and Annie McGhee-Stinson discuss stress and info overload in an interview with IORG’s Lele Terenzani.  

IORG focuses on information overload in the “office” space, but there are many other kinds of IO out there. Here I want to mention the problems seen in the medical profession, which has the distinction that when information in it runs wild, people die. There are a number of distinct mechanisms involved: The interaction of the doctor with the patient […]

In his latest book, Digital Minimalism, technology and productivity expert Cal Newport offers advice on how to free yourself from the tyranny of email, social media, and other digital services. Cal Newport is a Computer Science professor at Georgetown University who has written two books about how to Focus in an ever-increasingly noise-filled world; Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in […]

We all know that there is a HUGE amount of data being created and put online, but many of us fail to grasp the true size, scale and scope of the amount of data that is being created.  Here are some numbers to try to put things in perspective… Currently, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day […]

We need to consider how Information Overload can help impact and drive the development of Visual Dashboards, and how cognitive and data visualization techniques can help guide their design. As background, there are three main types of working memory: Intrinsic This refers to the complexity of the material being presented and its effect on cognitive load. Extraneous This refers to […]

Information Overload (IO) is typically associated with processing input from external sources, such as Email and Search Engine results. However, Information Overload can also occur when retrieving information from our memory. The “cue” used for information retrieval may be associated with multiple items in our long-term memory. Specificity of encoding information to be stored will reduce this risk. Matthew Guyan […]

To all people that work, no matter what’s the work, we all need in massive amount to communicate. To understand what we do to talk to peers to share what we do to learn about what has to be done to understand from the environment how to do it and the list could continue for several pages. Alone we are […]

Our search of gathered and stored content in our digital storage devices may be aided by secondary keys; yet the basic architecture is rows and columns unless you have a semantic storage system. The advent of knowledge graphs (commercially available)  can transform your storage taxonomy into a folksonomy–saving time and overload of retrieved contents. Pruning our retrieval hits from external […]

We tend to focus or prioritize our time on URGENT tasks without necessarily considering the importance of each task. A variety of individuals have offered suggestions to reduce this bias. Alice Boyes in a Harvard Business Review article proposed prioritizing tasks in consideration of your longer-term goals or “big picture.” The Eisenhower Approach provides a 4 quadrant matrix for classifying your tasks. […]

As shared last week, FOMO can lead to addictive checking of all your social and work media channels resulting in increased stress and decreased productivity. Dr. Axe provides a five-step process for decreasing cell phone addiction. Could also be applicable to e-mail inbox addiction. Real-time messaging certainly has some benefits, e.g., alerts for traffic congestion, a loved one in trouble, […]

FOMO or Fear of Missing Out has become a national disease that impacts our personal and work lives. Addiction to frequently checking our e-mail, Twitter, Instagram, etc. accounts singularly or overall diminishes time spent on work tasks and family activities. Aysel Safarova @ chanty.com has an interesting blog post (3/17) discussing the impact of FOMO on worker productivity. If you […]

OVERLOAD – IS IT HARMING US?: BY M.MANN -EMAILOGIC Is your reliance on email affecting your health?  The US technology consultant Linda Stone has discovered that many of us unconsciously hold our breath, or breathe shallowly while responding to emails – a habit that can compound stress. This can then add fuel to a host of other symptoms such as […]

Nick Ingram (July 2016) states the known: more signal, less noise. He also proposes that old information “stands the test of time” is more useful than new information. Yet isn’t new information more actionable? This proposal plus reducing social media input certainly could help reduce IO; yet current, relevant inputs should not be disregarded. His website clearthinking.co does have some interesting and […]

After conducting 1500 interviews with clinicians, a complex rules set was developed to filter out “meaningless data” and create visualizations to focus attention on critical information elements. This is an amazing remedy for abundant clinical information communicated real-time for patient care. Worth your quick read: How the Mayo Clinic is combating information overload in critical care units Marty B #IORGforum

Daniel Levitan’s book: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (Dutton/Penguin 2014) describes in Chapters 2 & 3 how the mental processes for encoding, organizing and retrieving accepted information can increase or decrease your cognitive load for information processing. The content is more than replacing a formal taxonomy with your personal folksonomy. Fascinating read. Marty B. #IORGforum

One definition of information is the degree of uncertainty reduction. How much information do you need to gather to achieve an acceptable confidence level that you have sufficient information to make a judgment or decision? Herb Simon made a distinction between optimization and satisfaction. Similarly, an inverted U curve for amount of information gathered suggests that too much information creates an excessive […]

When I started working on mitigating Information Overload at Intel, back in the mid-90s, it was all about email overload, and the solutions we worked on then were all about how to send less and better email, sort and process incoming email faster and more sensibly, and – once we figured out the underlying cultural causes – improving norms and […]

Recently I was invited to give a keynote lecture at the XV International Conference on University Libraries in Mexico City last month. The conference was dedicated to the changing role of university libraries, and their place in the United Nations’ “Agenda 2030” program. My lecture, titled “Libraries and Knowledge in the Age of Information Overload”, took a close look at […]

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.

A friend pointed out an interesting patent application from IBM. The proposed system allows one to send people a calendar meeting invite that specifies no distractions are allowed during the meeting (an “exclusive attendance event”); after the attendee accepts, their computer will automatically suspend non-event related activities while the meeting is in progress. There are some additional refinements, but basically […]

A year ago, Basex announced that Information Overload would be the 2008 “Problem-of-the-Year.”  Now that we know that Information Overload costs the U.S. economy a minimum of $900 billion per year, it appears that it will be 2009’s problem as well. Whether sitting at a desk in the office, in a conference room, in one’s home office, or at a […]

In the beginning there was Email Overload. Then RSS feeds arrived on the scene, and at first they looked like an interesting alternative to email as a way for getting information to people. They had that “pull mode” aspect – you could subscribe only to feeds you needed, unlike email that gets pushed at you by other people. Of course […]

By IORG member Nitin Badjatia While we often think of the productivity loss of information overload from an individual perspective, aggregating the impact of lost productivity across a large group can lead to some astounding realizations.  An example of this in the call center environment.  Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing and observing process […]

The breakdown of the nation’s financial industry plus recent events in financial markets worldwide have made me wonder about the role of information overload in the current financial crisis.  Headlines have made it painfully clear that financial institutions were unsure of their assets and liabilities.  Usually, this would be attributed to an inadequacy of available information but that’s far from […]

An observation: most of my best ideas come to me during business trips. Ideas that then lead to major projects or products, ideas that are worth a lot – they tend to materialize in a plane, or behind the wheel of a rental car, or in a hotel room far from home. In fact, this is not just me – […]

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 […]

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 […]

In an article called “Information Overload is Killing You and Your Productivity,” CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum cites a new report from The Burton Group. It says information overload has ramped up in IT organizations — with predictable effects. Says Wailgum: “The cumulative response from the CIO community to all of this info-insanity is: ‘Stop the world! I need to get off!’” […]

(By Jonathan Spira) Despite the fact that there are 56 million of us out there, people continue to struggle both with the definition of a knowledge worker as well as with self-identification. If we are going to solve the problems of the knowledge economy, such as Information Overload, we need to be more comfortable with the concept of knowledge work. […]

Instant messaging tools like AIM or ICQ allow users to text each other in real time, and to exchange quick messages. Can you imagine something more disruptive than a text message that appears on your screen while you are trying to concentrate? Well, a recent paper by Garrett & Danziger (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/garrett.html) will make you think again. The paper, published in […]