Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged informationoverload →  View Popular

"The possible link between information overload and suicides among employees at France Telecom may be spurious. But recent research indicates that information overload can have a negative effect on such activities as organizational decision making, innovation, and productivity. In one study, for example, people took an average of nearly 25 minutes to return to a work task after an email interruption. Another study found that time lost to handling unnecessary e-mail and recovering from information interruptions cost Intel nearly $1 billion a year. An article in the October issue of HBR, found that forcing knowledge workers to take weekly breaks from email and other work distractions improved performance."

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Current research suggests that the surging volume of available information—and its interruption of people’s work—can adversely affect not only personal well-being but also decision making, innovation, and productivity. In one study, for example, people took an average of nearly 25 minutes to return to a work task after an e-mail interruption. That’s bad news for both individuals and their organizations.

There’s hope, though. Innovative tools and techniques promise relief for those of us struggling with information inundation. Some are technological solutions—software that automatically sorts and prioritizes incoming e-mail, for instance—designed to regulate or divert the deluge. Others prevent people from drowning by getting them to change the way they behave and think. Who knows: Maybe someday even I will enjoy swimming in the powerful currents of information that now threaten to pull me under.

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You will find that close to half of the emails in our inbox don’t have much to do with “communication” at all, and fall in one of the above categories. Ironically, email is supposed to be a tool for “asynchronous communication”. A majority of emails are about teams and groups coordinating activities, discussing work related matters, or actually working on tasks like editing documents and sending them back and forth as attachments.

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Researchers at IBM Research and MIT's Sloan School of Management found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue. To unearth that and other data, they used mathematical formulas to analyze the e-mail traffic, address books, and buddy lists of 2,600 IBM consultants over the course of a year. (Their identities were shielded from researchers, who viewed them only as encrypted numbers, known as hash codes.) They compared the communication patterns with performance, as measured by billable hours.

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E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it.

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I want to talk to you about email, the psychology of email

It is a vital part of business, we all depend on it and we don’t even think about how we use it despite the fact that it’s really very new - only had it in business for the last 10 years or so. As email spreads it tendrils and becomes more and more common - it’s ubiquitous now, there was a time when you had to make a business case for email, now its the first thing you get. And it’s starting to become a problem.

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I think some of the so-called “information overload” is actually a “channels” problem - we often use the wrong channels for a given purpose. Email, of course, is the most prone to abuse. Part of this is a lack of accepted, shared protocols that would bring some sense and order to the email chaos. Part of this is the old “hammer” problem - when all you have is a hammer, everything is treated as if it were a nail. Clearly, tools such as Instant Messaging, collaboration hubs, and a better balance between “push” and “pull” communication methods can take the sting out of email. At nGenera, my email traffic is down significantly since we began using a collaboration hub.

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I could share dozens and dozens of items on what it has meant for me to eventually move away from corporate e-mail and instead engage through social software to increase my collaborative and knowledge sharing efforts. However, going to try to keep it short. So I will mention that my main key benefits from making such jump have been to no longer feel stranded in the e-mail world, having tasks delegated on to you, just because you have the information / knowledge. I no longer have the pressure of having to constantly keep up with the incoming flow of e-mails of which a good chunk of them I wouldn’t even need to get them in the first place! I no longer sense I have lost control of my own productivity while helping others get their tasks done. I no longer feel it is me against them and the corporation. Them sending e-mails across more and more by the day, me, attempting to address them all and try to finish with a zero inbox, which almost never happened!

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In this experiment 300 engineers and managers, located in two US sites (Austin, TX and Chandler, AZ), agreed to minimize interruptions and distractions every Tuesday morning. During these periods they had all set their email and IM clients to “offline”, forwarded their phones to voice mail, avoided setting up meetings, and isolated themselves from “visitors” by putting up a “Do not disturb” sign at their doorway. The purpose was to see the effect of 4 hours of contiguous “thinking time”.

On the whole, the 7-month pilot returned markedly positive results. It has been successful in improving employee effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life for numerous employees in diverse job roles. 45% of post-pilot survey respondents had found it effective as is, and 71% recommended we consider extending it to other groups, possibly after applying some modifications

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What do you think? Is turning off some of the communications channels the only way to solve the information overload? Or can you manage the “flood” of email while not reducing your ability to get things done? How do you manage your things to do?

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