Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 27)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

 

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.
Bonnie Friedman.

A third of adults go online each day for no particular reason
Internet is just there, dangling over our heads like a mobile full of planets and kitties and smiley faces, and we're just staring up at it from our cribs like a bunch of little babies. 

188,000,000,000 emails, 60,000,000 facebook updates, 140,000,000 tweets per day

Six top tips on email overload
Six top tips on email overload... How to achieve more efficient use of email, by two experts

Email Overload? Reclaim Your Inbox, Don’t Banish It
Excessive information (including email) is a danger to productivity. It diverts attention, derails trains of thought and increases stress. However, considering Mr. Breton’s concern over the reported high level of distraction caused by reading unnecessary email messages, I’m rather surprised at the alternatives being proposed 

Zero Email Has Zero Chance, But How About An Email Diet?
Atos CEO Thierry Breton is banning company email.There’s been a lot of recent press coverage about a French company’s decision to become a “zero email” company by 2013.

You've Got Mail (But Don't Read It) : One Third of Emails Unread
I recently read that Brits receive an average of 36 emails every day but a third is never read. I wasn't surprised.

Information Overload Is Causing Illness and Costing Money, Experts Warn
The culture of modern business needs to change, with workers drowning under a deluge of emails and information, experts warned Monday 

Seven Steps to Lower Information Overload
How to keep yourself sane and functional in a world awash in data. There’s a lot being said about the problem of information overload, but not much being actually done about it.

10 Ways to Stop Communication Overload
Communication is as important as it used to be, there's just way too much of it. Communication is out of control and it's killing our productivity and effectiveness. Here's how to make it stop.

7 Steps to Dealing with Information Overload
How do we know what to focus on? How can we deem what is relevant, newsworthy, or beneficial to the maintenance of our employment status without checking it out? How do we deal with info overload?

Is technology driving you crazy - or is it really your staff?
Businesses that are serious about tackling information overload need to look beyond the technology and change their company culture, says silicon.com's Steve Ranger. I once had a colleague who had a policy of only reading email if it was addressed to him and him alone.

Stress: the curse of modern technology revealed in poll
It seems as though our ability to evolve wisely is not keeping pace with the technological revolution, and that all the wonderful new technologies that we have come to rely on are controlling many of us.

Technology as a Solution: Managing Information Overload
Julie Wedgwood introduced her talk session titled “Managing Information Overload” by speaking about how much information comes our way every single day and how that could impact the way we introduce social networking into our (learning) business 

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 26)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have,
determines your true worth - Thomas Carlyle

Clay Johnson on info overload vs. info overconsumption.
We assign blame for our overconsumption in odd ways. Gulp down one too many cupcakes and that's 100% on you. Yet, if you're overwhelmed by the fire hose/deluge/tsunami of information, blame must be placed elsewhere: on those glutton-minded information sources or the overall degradation of society or ... anywhere really, as long as it doesn't reflect back on your own lack of control. Information overload seems to always be someone else's fault. 

How Information Overload is Causing Brain Congestion
I visited him in the lab in Sao Paulo recently and he told me that we humans are suffering from information  indigestion. “We became informivores. We eat information all the time,” he said. Which can produce some unfortunate side effects: “If you eat too much information your brain can’t digest it.” 

5 Cool Ideas for avoiding information overload
The good news is that we live in an information age. The bad news is that there seems to be way too much information. Here are 5 Cool Ideas for avoiding information overload.

Information overload wastes two weeks a year
British workers have to sift through so many emails and electronic documents  that they waste nearly two weeks a year searching for information they have  previously read but then lost.

Email response expectations leading to stress: report
A new report has found that technology is accelerating email response times, creating unrealistic expectations, email overload, error and costly workplace stress. Author of Brilliant Email, published by Pearson in 2011, email management expert Dr Monica Seeley points out that a few years ago a response to an email was expected within a few days or even a week.

Lightening the load on your email inbox  
Email can be a useful tool, but the sheer volume can be overwhelming. This year, around 349 billion emails will be sent worldwide, according to the market research firm Radicati Group Inc. That total is expected to grow to 507 billion by 2013.

6 Ways to Stop Email Overload
A recent report from market research firm The Radicati Group offers some sobering statistics about email use. The number of global email accounts is expected to grow from 3.1 billion in 2011 to almost 4.1 billion by the end of 2015 — an average annual growth rate of 7 percent. Radicati estimates that roughly 350 billion emails will be sent worldwide this year and that the number will increase to 507 billion by 2013. 

Shocker: Most Americans Check Work Email During Holidays  
The majority of employed American adults (68%) with work email accounts check their messages during traditional family holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Among those checking their email, 27% do so multiple times each day. Those checking their accounts are not likely to find empty inboxes as 79% of those polled say they receive emails from clients or colleagues during the holidays.

Too much information: Data overload at work damages staff motivation, survey of 2,000 employees
Employees in the UK are “drowning in droplets rather than floods of data” at work, and are struggling to navigate, organise and digest this collectively, which is costing businesses. 

Do the Digital Natives burn out because of technological overload?  
Do the internet, the constant accessibility and the opportunity of being online 24/7 result in overload? And are particularly the Digital Natives at the risk of burning out early in their career.

 

 

 

Are incoming messages unnecessary interruptions or necessary tasks?

 

In recent months there appears to have been a proliferation of articles describing peoples attempts to work without email (you can read some here and here)

We know that this movement is in response to the overwhelming volume of incoming email but we ask if it's really the answer. We believe that managing the flow well is better than turning off the tap.

Firstly we agree with their actions in getting rid of the slightly-better-than-junk emails – the notifications you subscribed to but haven't used in some time. Simply unsubscribe.

Secondly, the newsletters and notifications that are useful, create a filter that puts them in a separate folder and schedule a time to read them to get the necessary information out of them.

Adhere to good email etiquette yourself, by only sending succinct relevant emails and spend time training those you correspond with on this.

Schedule a couple of times a day to go through incoming messages (and turn off the new message notification). Incoming messages are no longer just emails but may be coming in from a number of sources. One of the articles above made reference to their boss sending a Twitter DM instead of an email. We'd argue it's still an incoming message and will take the same processing time. In which case, it is good to have all your messages in one inbox (saves time checking multiple sources) and going through them at set times.

While doing the scheduled message check you are transforming messages into tasks – and these tasks are going to be a part of your workflow (or someone else's, if delegation is appropriate) over the next few hours, days (or weeks depending on urgency).

So despite the number of people attempting to work without email, we maintain that emails are just one form of incoming messages that every person needs to be able to manage and that getting the right training and finding the right tools is more effective than simply stopping using email.