Held Hostage by Info Overload

Here is a wonderful article titled, “We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload” written by then doctoral student Mark Nelson.

Twelve Years of Inundation

"The average Fortune 1000 worker already is sending and receiving approximately 178 messages and documents each day, according to a study, "Managing Corporate Communications in the Information Age." (Boles, 1997 “Help! Information overload.” Workforce Magazine)

Informed but not Overwhelmed

How can you stayed informed without being overwhelmed?

* Choose to acquire knowledge that supports or interests you, not what you simply happen to ingest, or think you have to ingest.

* Look for broad-based patterns and trends, as opposed to quickly disappearing fads and forgettable trivia.

* Learn to delegate some of your reading to your most junior staff. After only 15 minutes of instruction and armed with a list of key words, they will be able to rather easily identify articles of interest to you.

* Prune your files regularly and ruthlessly. Constantly throw out what does not support you.

Eliminate the Extraneous

When you're besieged by information on a continual basis, you begin to feel overwhelmed, which leads to the feeling of over-work and stress. If you're able to eliminate a lot of the extraneous information that makes its way to you, you will actually experience being overwhelmed less frequently, and you will not feel as over-worked. Try getting off mailing lists and dropping most subscriptions, avoiding extraneous information whenever you can.

Loud Noise is Harmful

Too much information or communication, especially when it’s loud can harm you. The health effects of sound may, literally, echo through our bodies. A study in the Journal of Occupational Health took nighttime readings on workers who were exposed to loud sounds during the day.

The workers' sleep quality was poor, their nighttime heart rates never dropped as low as those of people not exposed to noise, and their cortisol levels were still elevated the following morning.

Information Without End

The volume of new knowledge published in every field is enormous and exceeds anyone's ability to keep pace. Everyone today fears that they are under-informed.
* In its 50th year, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. added more than 950,000 items to its collections!
* Even the English language keeps expanding. Since 1966, the English language has gained more than 66,000 words -- equal to half or more of most other languages.

Awareness of What?

Kim Strassel, writing in the the Wall Street Journal a few years back pointed out the fallacy of too many days and dates to keep in mind:

Chase Annual Events contains more than 12,000 entries and is more than 700 pages long. The book allows any sponsor of an event to send in an item and will publish it free of charge, though it limits entries to those that are of national or broadly regional interest or that seem to have some special entertainment value.

Last month, we find Listen to Your Inner Critic Month, Freedom From Bullies at Work Week, Create a Great Funeral Day, National Be Bald and Be Free Day, National Sarcastics Month and National She Loves God Week.

Awareness campaigns have become so commonplace these days that even presidents throw them about willy-nilly. Chase's shows dozens of presidential proclamations in 2000, ranging from National Safe Boating Week to Spirit of the ADA Month (celebrating the American With Disabilities Act) to National Day of Concern About Young People and Gun Violence.

The result of awareness-day fatigue is that some of the more serious groups -- those that had previously accomplished some charitable good with awareness days -- have thought about getting out.

Info Overload at Every Turn

The reality of our times: information overload at every turn. In the last 12 months, in the U.S. alone:
156,000 books were published
1,120 new magazines were launched
7,200 movies were offered on DirecTV
218,000 programs were televised.
658 films were produced

Decide now to only choose the best of information and communication resources; you simply don't have time for the rest!

One Thing at a Time

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.

"In with the New" Ad Nauseum

* 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

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

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.

Diminish Credit Junk Mail

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.

Today's Forecast: Data Smog

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.

Internet Protocol Overload!

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

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.

An Epidemic of Unhappiness

"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

Simplify Your Bargain Hunting

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.

Ipod and Lightning

Getting struck while wearing your iPod: "Doctors at Vancouver General Hospital in Canada said a 37-year-old jogger wearing an iPod was left with a Y-shaped burn on his chest, neck and face after the man and a nearby tree were struck by lightning in 2005. The lightning then jumped to the jogger."

"Witnesses reported that he was thrown approximately 2.4 metres from the tree, they said. His eardrums were ruptured, his jaw fractured and he suffered first- and second-degree burns from his chest -- where the device was strapped -- up into his ear channels, along the trail of the iPod's earphones. He also had burns down his left leg and foot, where the electricity exited his body, blowing his sneaker to smithereens in the process."

"While lightning usually flashes over a victim's skin, the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the headphones of an iPod can act as a conductor, directing a bolt of electricity straight inside the listener's ear - rupturing eardrums and leaving severe burns."

So, there are times when it pays to NOT be connected to the information, communication, sight, and sound network that engulfs us all!

Clean My Mailbox

Check out www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html which offers a "free tool to generate specific instructions on how to whitelist your publication(s) within a variety of popular fitering solutions in use today."

By filling in and submitting a form they supply, and you'll be presented with the custom HTML code to use in developing your own customized Whitelisting Instructions web page.

Too Much Info, too Little Sleep

Only 3 per cent of professionals get eight hours of sleep every night of the working week. According to Travelodge's 2007 sleep study, company directors are the most sleep-deprived of all, with 8 per cent getting under four hours of rest per night.

The survey included more than 5,200 individuals from 30 different careers to discover more about how work affects rest. Those in the travel industry, such as cabin crew and pilots, found it hardest to get to sleep: 86% struggled with sleepless nights. Teachers were the most likely to stay awake because they were worrying about their work (39%). Here are the top 10 most sleep-deprived professions are:

* Company directors (averaging 5.9 hours of sleep a night)
* Ambulance crew/paramedics (6 hours)
* Tradesmen (6 hours)
* Leisure and hospitality workers (6 hours)
* Police officers (6.1 hours)

* Factory workers (6.2 hours)
* Nurses (6.3 hours)
* Engineers (6.3 hours)
* Doctors (6.4 hours)
* Civil servants (6.4 hours)

Cell Phones Decrease Freedom

"Cell phones-and, indeed, all wireless devices-constitute another chapter in the ongoing breakdown between work and everything else. They pretend to increase your freedom while actually stealing it. People are supposed to be always capable of participating in the next meeting, responding to their e-mails or retrieving factoids from the Internet. People so devoted to staying interconnected are kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, because they may have missed some significant memo, rendezvous, bit of news or gossip. They may be more plugged in and less thoughtful.
--Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek columnist

Cell Phones Plague Family Life

A study published in the "Journal of Marriage and Family" finds that cell phone and pager use has become a vehicle for job worries and problems to interfere with family life for both men and women. Cell phone technology is linked to increased psychological distress and lower family satisfaction in general for working men and women.

Upshot: Manage your cell phone after hours or it will quickly manage you.

Small Transgressions Exposed

Jennifer Saranow, writing in the Wall Street Journal, discusses how “bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online.” In some respects this can be socially beneficial, but too quickly, I fear, such postings represent the kind of over-information in which too many people are immersed.

Too Many Choices!

If making product purchases was as simple as choosing supermarket items, we could all cope. But the tyranny of choice extends to large products, as well as services like insurance, retirement options, investments, and frequent flyer programs.

By the time we absorb all the rules and regulations, we heap on more stress to our already stretched-thin composure. I recommend that you judge the merits of any product or service on two criteria:

(1) the intended benefit, and

(2) the ease with which we can understand and enjoy those benefits.

Info Overload to Max

This appeared in today’s news and is either an indication of capitalism run amok or simply the inability of management to contribute to passengers’ sense of breathing space.:

“US Airways to place ads on barf bags”

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- US Airways wants to make the most out of a nauseating situation. The Tempe, Arizona-based airline plans to sell advertisements on its air-sickness bags -- those pint-sized expandable envelopes tucked between the in-flight magazines and safety cards.

"They're in every back seat pocket," said spokesman Phil Gee. "We figure while it's there, why don't we make it multipurpose?

– what’s next? Toilet paper rolls with ads on each sheet?

And this was Before 9-11

“Biggest U.S. spy agency choking on too much information”

By Correspondent David Ensor, 07/01

FORT MEADE, Maryland (CNN) -- The largest U.S. spy agency, the National Security Agency, is in crisis, overwhelmed by too many targets, too much information and the challenges created by increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The NSA is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, about halfway between Washington and Baltimore. With its 38,000 employees, it is more than twice the size of the CIA, and at least twice as secretive.

"It produces, probably produces, 80 percent of the intelligence the United States uses," said James Bamford, author of "The Puzzle Palace." The agency's mission is to listen for threats to U.S. national security and it faces an increasingly daunting task.

An annotated Webliography

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov says “In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, an evil king, was condemned to Hades to forever roll a big rock to the top of a mountain, and then the rock always rolled back down again. A similar version of Hell is suffered every day by people with forever full e-email boxes. At his website Dr. Bezroukov provides an “Information and Work Overload” annotated Webliography.

Language and Economy

According to the New York Times, only about half of China's population can speak its national language, which is Mandarin. China’s 55 ethnic minorities, and the majority Han population, converse in a total of 1,599 dialects, most of them incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.

With the bewildering array of information that cannot easily be conveyed, it might be a while before China’s economy becomes all it could be.

Ad Clutter Abounds

Did you know that the typical fall fashion magazine requires readers to flip through 128 pages before finding the first feature article? How about this: In 1965, the typical news sound bite lasted 45 seconds. By the year 2,000 it had dropped to 8 seconds. Ad clutter has increased annually since 1985 and has now exceeded the over-whelming level for many viewers.

Unrelenting Information Overload

Information overload abounds in our society:

* In the last 12 months, 165,000 books were published just in the U.S.

* 1,100 new magazines were launched.

* 720,000 network and cablecast programs were broadcast.

* 650 films were produced.

* The Smithsonian Institution added 1,200,000 items to its collection.

Is it any wonder that you are experiencing information overload, which results in wasted time, poor decision-making, and stress?