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5 commentsWednesday, December 26, 2007

Information Overload Costing $650 Billion

It’s The Problem Of The Year For 2008

Information overload is being called the 2008 "Problem-of-the-Year" by research firm Basex.

Basex.com

Information overload reduces employee efficiency and overall productivity and has been flagged as a key challenge for companies that operate in the knowledge economy. The cost of unnecessary interruptions is estimated to be $650 billion per year in the United States according to Basex, which took into account, decreased productivity and stifled innovation.

"The 'Problem-of-the-Year' designation tells us how serious an issue information overload has become," said Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex. "Nothing has been more disruptive to the way we work than information overload."

No matter where one is working the chances of completing a task without interruption is small. "Normally we designate a person or product of the year," said David M. Goldes, president and senior analyst at Basex. "2008 is the year we begin to solve the problem of information overload in a substantive way."

Intel, a company with 94,000 employees, views the problem as serious. At Intel we estimated the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week," says Nathan Zeldes, a Principal Engineer focusing on computing productivity issues at Intel. "We are now looking at applying new work behaviors that can help reduce this impact".

Spira recommends to resist the urge to immediately follow up an email with instant messaging or a phone call. He said the subject line should clearly reflect the topic and urgency of an email. He added to use "reply all" only when necessary.
 

About the author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews.

Information Overload

I'm such a pathetic small time would-be marketer I probably shouldn't be writing at all, but I have to agree with every word above. You know it's getting bad when you spend up to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week in front of your PC and then realise that you've really done nothing at all. Read and deleted 2000 + emails trying to sell you a $197 course on how to focus. Visited countless web pages offering software that will have you on your own yacht and married to an Angelina Jolie look-alike by Thursday or just so rich you live on the beach at St.Kitts. The sum total of your week's work is to write a couple of mediocre sales pages and list a couple of mediocre e-Books onto your website that makes $4 a month in sales. Needless to say, information overload is my main problem. It is now nearly 2am. I've been here since 6am and, honestly, don't think I've actually achieved anything except a splitting headache. Pity there's nothing that can be done about it. Grumpy

Info overload fix

Collaboration is the key. Why not solve a global problem with the group genius that comes from everybody adding their own two cents worth of fix. Only $649,999,999,999.98 to go. Doug

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