Managing Information and Communication Overload

Career Advancement Resources

2008-07-22T14:10:00.001-05:00

After 16 years in Chapel Hill, we're packing up to head to the state capitol, Raleigh NC. What this means to you is that for the remainder of July, we're offering an unprecedented learning resources package. Only $99 (which includes shipping, and tax plus shipping for NC residents) gets you $274 of our best resources:

$78 worth of Books
[ ] The Complete Guide to Public Speaking (Wiley, 324 pages) $16.95
[ ] Marketing Yourself and Your Career (Adams Media, 238 pages) $12.95
[ ] Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Things Done (Alpha/Penguin, 324 pages) $18.95
[ ] Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Stress (Alpha/Pearson, 372 pages, $18.95)
[ ] The 60-Second Procrastinator (Adams Media, 142 pages) $9.95

$198 worth of CDs and Audio Books
[ ] The 60-Second Procrastinator (Oasis Audio, 140 minutes) $19.95
[ ] Surviving Information Overload (NIBM, 72 minutes) $14.95
[ ] Relaxing at High Speed (ACHE, 32 minutes) $9.95
[ ] Blow Your Own Horn (Simon & Schuster, 60 minutes) $10.95
[ ] Time, Stress, Simplicity (Skillpath PersonalQuest, 300 minutes) $59.95
[ ] Getting Articles Published (PR Leads, 57 minutes) $19.95
[ ] Selling Your Book's 'Sub Rights' (PR Leads, 59 minutes) $19.95
[ ] Foreign Rights Sales (PR Leads, 60 minutes) $19.95
[ ] Creating a Brilliant Book Outline (BSI, 53 minutes, $15.95)
[ ] Giving Better Presentations (Dreamcoach, 55 minutes, $16.95)

Plus CD and Article Bonuses

To order: www.breathingspace.com/content/view/752/192/
Description: career advancement
Amount: $99

Beyond the Information Explosion

2008-07-12T07:38:00.002-05:00

As I wrote in my 2007 book, Breathing Space, the term "Information Explosion" has no meaning. The discharge of information spewing forth since the phrase information explosion was first coined dwarfs the original meaning. Within a few years, half of our technical knowledge will have been replaced.

Every other page in all the texts on AIDS, biomass, chemical dependency, diet, electronic funds transfer, fire retardation, gynecology, hydrogen fission, immunology, jet propulsion, kinetics, linear motion, meteorology, novas, obstetrics, pituitary functioning, quasars, relativity, sonar, telemetry, uranium, viruses, wellness, x-rays, yacht racing, and zoology, will be rewritten.

So, your task becomes to focus on the handful of key developments in your field that will have the greatest impact on you, your organization, your family, and your world.

Get Organized, Starting Now

2008-06-17T12:06:00.001-05:00

I'm pleased to announce the publication of my 53rd and 54th books:

* The "60 Second Self-Starter" (Adams Media, ($9.95), is an action guide to help career professionals become more accomplished and satisfied with work and life. Its earlier version, the "60 Second Procrastinator," has been published in Arabic, Chinese Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Turkish, and in English India, Singapore, and Malaysia.

* The "60 Second Organizer" (Adams Media, 2nd edition, $9.95) is a fun book offering 60 solid techniques that help you to maintain organization at your desk, office, home, car, and elsewhere. It has been published in Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese, and in English for India, Singapore, and Malaysia.

During June only, receive both books, autographed, for $16 total, shipping included. Order at www.breathingspace.com/content/view/752/192/
1) at "description" type in: 2 Book deal
2) at "amount" type in $16.00, and hit enter

One Thing at a Time

2008-05-25T14:57:00.001-05:00

What is the fastest, most efficient way you can handle all the things competing for your attention? Prioritize them, and then handle them one at a time. It sounds simple enough, but this goes against the grain of society, which "says" do many things at once to be more efficient.

You see this every day: someone jogging down the road listening to an Ipod or somebody doing work or reading while eating lunch. People double up activities, as if somehow that is going to make things easier, better, more rewarding, or longer lasting.

Consider some of the greatest people in history: George Washington, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Were they in a hurry? Sure, they acted urgently because the things they did were important, but did they walk faster, talk faster, try to do any of the things we do today to be
"efficient?" No -- they had mastered the art of doing one thing at a time.

The daily information and media shower leaves each of us incapable of ingesting, synthesizing, or applying the data before tomorrow's shower. You've got to break out of the mindset that society has imposed upon you. Sometimes the best way to be productive is to sit at your desk doing
nothing; at least nothing that looks like anything to people walking by.

Homogenizing Our Holidays

2008-05-20T09:07:00.002-05:00

Memorial Day is a day for remembering and honoring military personnel who died in the service of their country, particularly those who died in battle or as a result of wounds sustained in battle. We've homogenized our holidays, however, of this I am certain.

Instead of letting many of the holidays fall as they would, scattered throughout the days of the week, we now force fit them into Mondays or Fridays so that we can enjoy long weekends. No more Lincoln's Birthday, no more Washington's birthday, we now have President's Day, and too many citizens have no idea which presidents we're even honoring.

Labor day has become a shopping day. For many, Memorial Day has no meaning other than that which TV viewers may happen to view on the 6 o'clock news, when they see veterans marching in formation or loved ones visiting a cemetery. There is no national unity through the celebration of common national holidays. Indeed, if anything there is splintering. The quest for efficiency or uniformity has morphed into a social blandness in which no days stand out. No celebrations are worth getting worked up about, little or no true reflection occurs, and the only pauses anyone take is when they're forced to, i.e. the car stalls, the computer crashes, or blackout squelches electricity for a night.

"In with the New" Ad Nauseum

2008-05-08T11:35:00.003-05:00

* The Smithsonian Museum adds more than 1,000,000 items to its collection each year, most of which are not seen by the public.

* The fully printed documentation for every feature and system on a Boeing 757 outweighs the plane.

* The typical U.S. executive annually receives more than 54,000 e-mails, most of them spam.

For more eye-openers, visit: www.OpeningKeynote.com and www.BreathingSpaceBlog.com

Your Own Knowledge and Wisdom

2008-04-29T11:14:00.001-05:00

When you draw upon your own accumulated knowledge and the wisdom that you develop, you're able to intermittently free yourself from ever accelerating flows of information.

Life is Finite, Information Infinite

2008-04-10T10:20:00.001-05:00

Too much information violates our senses and even becomes harmful. As you receive more information, you experience stress, anxiety, and even helplessness. Your perception of breathing space is adversely and directly influenced by the more news, information and details that you ingest, or believe you have to ingest.

* In 1302, the Sorbonne Library in Paris housed 1,338 books, most handwritten, representing nearly all of humankind's accumulated knowledge spanning a few thousand years.
* In 2005, at least 730,000 books are published each year -- more than 2,000 a day.

In today's business environment we are being pulled in so many directions at once!Recognize, with the clarity of death, that life is finite; you cannot wistfully ingest the daily deluge of information/communication and expect to achieve balance.

Don't passively yield to the din and settle for living your life in what's left over after each day's onslaught. Hereafter make sensible choices about what is best ignored and what merits your time and attention.

Giving Your Brain a Boost

2008-04-01T19:23:00.003-05:00

According to an article in the Big News Network, this endless year of campaigning could have a silver lining. E lection-year politics could give your brain a boost: "the fever pitch of the season can," says Neuro-pharmacologist John D. Roache of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio inspire us in many ways. "The brain has hard-wired systems that control attention and learning in processes that motivate us, including hunger, sex drive and social involvement." An interest in politics can perhaps stimulate these systems in the brain!

We should be so lucky!

"As we listen to the candidates and think about what is being said, the brain processes the information, which grows neural connections and increases the neurochemical signaling that is associated with learning and memory," says Roache. Actively participating in the election campaigns may be even more beneficial than merely following them.

"If we become emotionally engaged and even become politically active by going to a rally or actively campaigning for a candidate, then the greater levels of emotion or commitment further enhance the brain processes and connect them all the more with the emotion and physical activity involved," he said. ...Here's hoping!

Diminish Credit Junk Mail

2008-02-28T14:10:00.002-05:00

Here's a nice feature to reduce receiving information you don't want or need. OptOutPrescreen enables you to "stop the credit-card-offer madness." Upon signing up on the site, you can opt to stop receiving credit card offers permanently or for the next five years.

Finding Info by Googling

2008-02-14T11:43:00.002-05:00

Google is the number one search engine in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Google now provides an interface for 120 languages and offers results in 35 languages. Remarkably, more than 50% of Google traffic is from outside the U.S.

So... how easily can you be found, on Google.com?

Eliminate Unwanted Mailings

2008-02-11T12:39:00.000-05:00

Catalogchoice.org offers a free service to help you “cut off the catalogs” for good. Simply click and select which the catalogs you do not want to receive instead of having to call each company to cancel.

Harness Social Complexity

2008-02-07T11:51:00.000-05:00

Business Week: At 20 large U.S. banks, the cost of complying with U.S. laws and regulations grew 159 percent from 2001 to 2006, far faster than profit growth, an industry survey found. It costs the average big bank $83.5 million a year to keep up with Surbanes-Oxley, the Patriot Act, and other laws.

Given this reality, each of us needs to build greater "administration" time and effort into our plans. Society inherently grows more complex all the time. Our challenge is to harness that complexity and convert it to a competitive advantage.

Misinformation: Anger for Hire

2008-01-31T16:15:00.000-05:00

In his article Anger for Hire reprinted in Readers Digest, Michael Crowley says, " You can't always believe what you see -- especially if you're looking at political protests."

"It's hard to know who to trust these days, " he says. "When we see people staging protests we think, Wow! These folks are passionate about their cause -- otherwise, why would they stand in the rain for hours? But sometimes it's a sham: You and even your Congressman may have been set up by manipulative marketers who pay serious money to hire protesters.

"It's a sneaky trick. Let's say you want to stage a political rally, but you just can't find enough people for a good turnout. What you need are folks with lots of time on their hands, who can be persuaded to make a fuss over almost anything. Solution: Head down to a homeless shelter and dole out cash."

Jeff's take on "anger for hire": it generates blatant misinformation. An alert press should interview a random sampling of the protesters, which would quickly reveal that many have no ideas about the issues about which they are "protesting!"

Today's Forecast: Data Smog

2008-01-08T16:48:00.000-05:00

In his 1997 book Data Smog: Surviving The Information Glut, David Shenk remarkably predicted our current state of social affairs:

"The law of diminishing returns, applied to the growing speed and abundance of information, will produce infoglut that will no longer add to our quality of life. Infoglut is already beginning to
cultivate stress, confusion, and ignorance," he said. "Information overload threatens our ability to educate ourselves, leaves us more vulnerable as consumers, and less cohesive as a society, and diminishes control over most of our lives."

Here are Shenk's first 12 Laws of Data Smog:
1. Information is now plentiful and taken for granted.
2. Silicon circuits evolve more quickly than human genes; a future information overload disease is called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.
3. Computers are neither human nor humane.
4. Putting a computer in every classroom is like putting an electric power plant into every home; education cannot be fixed with a digital pipeline of data.
5. The sales goal of the information industry is information anxiety; by 1995, computer users considered their machines obsolete in just two years.
6. Too many experts spoil the clarity; the paralysis of analysis.
7. In a glutted environment, the most difficult task is finding a receptive audience.
8. As info supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease, and people turn to niche media and specialized knowledge.
9. The electronic town hall allows for speedy communication and bad decision-making; government is too responsive to an ill-informed citizenry.
10. Personal privacy has replaced censorship as the prime concern of civil liberties.
11. In our increasing distraction and speediness, the lies will move so much faster than the truth, they will too often become the truth.
12. On the info highway, most roads bypass journalists, reducing the power of the press
and enhancing the power of public relations.

Thinking in an Age of Complexity

2008-01-02T13:47:00.000-05:00

How to Think: Managing Brain Resources in an Age of Complexity by Ed Boyden in Technology Review is brilliant article, excerpted herer

"When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules...

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read...

2. Learn how to learn, rapidly... Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works.

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there...

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day...

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things...

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly... Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on...

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols... Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world..

10. Keep it simple... If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler,
do it...

Drugged Nation

2007-12-18T08:34:00.000-05:00

You'll never convince me otherwise: as a society our default response to information and communication overload is ingesting psychopharmaceuticals. Patrick Di Justo, writing in Wired Magazine says, "America may be the land of Mickey Mouse and Goofy, but the US isn’t exactly the happiest place on Earth. Antidepressants are the most commonly popped pills in the country, accounting for 227 million prescriptions filled last year alone. Of course, Prozac and its descendants aren’t the only popular psychiatric meds: Remedies for seizure disorders — often used to treat bipolar disease, as well as epilepsy — and for anxiety are among the 10 most-prescribed drugs in the nation."

"But even as our hunger for pills has grown, basic innovation has slowed. Many “new” medications are actually reformulations of previously approved drugs, not novel molecules. As a result, some of the most widely taken treatments have been around for years: Today's leading anxiety beater, alprazolam, for example, originally hit the market in 1981 as Xanax."

Processing New Info at any Age

2007-12-16T09:41:00.000-05:00

Matthew Blakeslee writing for Discover says, "If old dogs haven’t been able to learn new tricks, maybe that’s because no one has known how to teach them properly. Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable—in a word, plastic."

"This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. Infants can sustain massive brain damage, up to the loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere, and still develop into nearly normal adults; any adult who loses half the brain, by contrast, is a goner. Adults can’t learn to speak new languages without an accent, can’t take up piano in their fifties then go on to play Carnegie Hall, and often suffer strokes that lead to permanent paralysis or cognitive deficiencies. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline."

"It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent.".

Wikipedia's Contorted Entries

2007-11-18T09:20:00.000-05:00

The Herald Tribune reports that "Last year, someone edited the Wikipedia entry for the Sea World theme parks to change all mentions of orcas to killer whales, insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species... There was another, unexplained edit: A paragraph about criticism of Sea World's "lack of respect toward its orcas" disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, Sea World's owner."

"Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, Virgil Griffith, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor's network."

...So, read what you will on Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt.

Internet Protocol Overload!

2007-11-15T08:34:00.000-05:00

BusinessWeek reports that the Internet is running out of addresses. There are 4 billion possible
combinations that make up a 10-digit IP (Internet Protocol) address, which identifies the location of computers, routers, and other network devices. Some 3 billion IP addresses are taken, and the remainder will likely be gone by 2010.

Overload in Packaging

2007-11-03T12:22:00.000-05:00

A New York Times story, titled "Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention" written by Louise Story, is most revealing about the direction of information overload in society:

"In the last 100 years, Pepsi had changed the look of its can, and before that its bottles, only 10 times. This year alone, the soft-drink maker will switch designs every few weeks. Kleenex boxes used to be square or rectangular, but no more. Kleenex, after 40 years of sticking with square and rectangular boxes, has started selling tissues in oval packages."

"Coors Light bottles now have labels that turn blue when the beer is chilled to the right temperature. And Huggies' Henry the Hippo hand soap bottles have a light that flashes for 20 seconds to show children how long they should wash their hands."

"Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers' attention. The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials. ...So they are using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves. "

Does this mean ever-accelerating product packaging changes and accompanying bombardment? It appears so.

Personal Success, Real Happiness

2007-10-09T15:52:00.000-05:00

In his book, The Templeton Plan: 21 Steps to Personal Success and Real Happiness, author John Templeton offers some rare gems in a world awash with self-help information. For example, he suggests demonstrating:

* Truthfulness when a lie would be so much easier.
* Reliability when you could slack off.
* Faithfulness during moments of doubt.
* Perseverance when you think that you are too tired to go on.

* Energy while encountering roadblocks.
* Humility while others heap their praise on you.
* Altruism although you may sense an atmosphere of selfishness around you.
* Joy at the moment your prospects seem darkest.

So refreshing to have handy these short passages of sage advice.

An Epidemic of Unhappiness

2007-09-20T09:12:00.000-05:00

"Being able to choose has enormous important positive effects on us, but only up to a point. As the number of choices we face increases, the psychological benefits we derive start to level off. At the same time, some of the negative effects of choice...begin to appear, and rather than leveling off, they accelerate...a point is reached at which increase choice brings increased misery rather than increased opportunity. It appears that American society has long since passed that point."

"There's a good reason to believe that the overwhelming choice at least contributes to the epidemic of unhappiness spreading through modern society."
- Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

Good News You Can Use

2007-08-16T06:46:00.000-05:00

What kind of information do you regularly receive from your favorite media sources? What type of picture do they paint about American society? Chris Michaud in a New York Post feature writes, "A surprising 94 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their lives -- although far fewer in New York and other Eastern states think they're better off than they were five years ago, according to a new survey."

"The Harris Poll of more than 1,000 people reported the overall 'satisfaction' level, defined as people who said they were either very or somewhat satisfied with their lot, was up 4 percentage points, from 90 percent two years ago. But only 42 percent of people in the Eastern U.S. said things had improved since 2002. By contrast, 60 percent of Southerners and 62 percent of Westerners said their lives had improved."

Why is this poll surprising? Perhaps certain media powers are pushing an agenda. So, perhaps, ignore the New York Times and the other eastern media elite, and you have a better chance of grasping current reality

Simplify Your Bargain Hunting

2007-07-30T12:03:00.000-05:00

Here are three sites that help you cut through the clutter of too many shopping choices:

www.Mpire.com offer a graph which depicts the average price of an item over time, on retail as well as auction sites. Hence if you're bidding for the item, you have much more price information at your finger tips.

www.Mytriggers.com enable you set your own price. You simply enter your product and how much you're willing to pay, and this site will provide you with vendor list. Then click on "Trigger It!" and the site will send you an email when the price of your item drops.

www.Frucall.com provides a service when you're comparison shopping." Type in an item's 12-digit bar code if you have it and the site will indicate if there's a lower price online.