Archive for January, 2011

An overlooked, sure-fire way to regain work time

Posted on January 29th, 2011 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

I was talking to a client who – like most of us – needed more hours in the day, and he complained that part of the problem was that he was required to generate long reports, and it took him hours and hours just to type them in. So I asked him, how does he type? Turns out he uses two fingers to peck at the keyboard. I asked him, why not ten? Why doesn’t he touch type? Of course he couldn’t touch type, nor was he planning to learn to; and neither do almost all the knowledge workers I.. Read more

Join us at IORG!

Posted on January 18th, 2011 · Posted in Uncategorized

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is looking to expand its membership, and if you are an Information Overload practitioner or researcher I heartily encourage you to join our ranks. IORG started off in 2007 as an informal “Infomania Workshop” of some two dozen interested people, and this evolved into an official non-profit interest group that had launched in a face to face conference in NYC in mid-2008. This group comprises academics, industry people, consultants, analysts and others – people from diverse backgrounds that share a common passion to understand and help mitigate the information overload problem that is threatening.. Read more

Facebook: a third factor in enterprise Information Overload?

Posted on January 13th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Information Overload can have manifold manifestations: physicians have more new articles coming out in their field than they can possibly cover, consumers have too many TV channels to choose from comfortably, journalists have a hard time staying on top of breaking news, and so forth. But in the enterprise, the domain of the knowledge worker population I belong to and serve, Information Overload took a fairly predictable and well-characterized form, and it had two underlying components: Email Overload and Interruptions (a.k.a. distractions). Until recently, this was it; find a way to handle the hundred or (many) more incoming emails a.. Read more

The ease of getting connected

Posted on January 6th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Welcome to a new decade, promising ever more technological change! Here is one change that came to my mind: I remember, as anyone of my generation does, how you used to have to wait more than a year to have a phone line delivered by the state-run phone monopoly of the time. In fact, after I got married in the mid-seventies and waited a couple of years, I got a shared line with my absent-minded neighbor, who would forget to hang up after conversing… This is now a fading memory; these days, we take it for granted that we can.. Read more