Managing Information and Communication Overload

Loud Noise is Harmful

2009-07-07T08:40:00.000-05:00

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.

The Daily Infoglut

2009-06-26T09:07:00.000-05:00

Each day, at a minimum:
[ ] The Library of Congress catalogues 7,000 new items.
[ ] 2000 books are published world wide.
[ ] More than 2,000 new websites go online.

Reduce the Volume of Items

2009-06-13T07:56:00.000-05:00

When you continually seek to reduce the volume of items you’ve retained, you have a better chance of managing information overload:

Rather than keeping a five-page report, retain only the single page that you actually need. Rather than retaining an entire page, clip the paragraph, address and phone number, or key item of information that you actually need, and chuck the rest of the page. With the small clipping or subsection of page you've retained, tape it to a single page, perhaps one that contains other relevant retained tidbits. Always strive to retain only the bare minimum information that you believe is necessary. Strive to reduce the size/weight/volume of the pile.

Reexamine everything in the pile once again. Even after you've pared down a particular pile to a smaller, more concise pile, review it with the notion "what am I continuing to retain that adds to little or nothing?" Perhaps you are already familiar with the issue an item represents and don't need to retain printed information relating to it.

Fasten together like items. When you've pared down your piles to the lowest possible volume and gotten them into mean, lean, slim, trim shape, keep like items together, using a stapler, paper clip, or rubber band. A paper clip assembling a packet of papers works best for temporary assemblage.

In general, the more like items you can fasten together, the easier it will be for you to find any particular item that you need!

When Information is Useless

2009-06-10T12:41:00.000-05:00

Information yields all types of trend data, be it the rise of IPhone use, or the popularity of twitter. What we never get is how these trends add: where things are going. When everything hits you from the left and right with no discernable pattern and no unifying theme, our lives seem hectic, change seems unmanageable, and few people have a clue as to how to prudently proceed in their lives.

Break the Grip

2009-06-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

To break the grip that too much information has on you, I suggest the following:

* When you get home, practice sitting in your TV room for 30 minutes without the TV on.

* Skip reading the newspaper, anytime you feel like it.

* In general, be more selective in what you decide to read. Just because there is an abundance of interesting articles to read, doesn't mean you have to read them.

We're all taking in more information than we can expect to absorb. You can only remember--and act upon--so much anyway; so, be selective!

Choices and Misery

2009-05-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

"Logic suggests that having options allows people to select precisely what
makes them happiest. But, as studies show, abundant choice often makes for
misery."
Barry Schwartz, "The Tyranny of Choice," Scientific American, April 2004

Dying for Information

2009-05-16T12:29:00.000-05:00

This is a scary one: Having too much information can be as dangerous as having too little. In his report Dying for Information, commissioned by Reuters Business Information, based in London, David Lewis, Ph.D. observes that too much information can lead to a paralysis of analysis, making it harder to find the right solutions or make decisions.

Control Your Spaces

2009-05-05T12:34:00.000-05:00

When you take control of the spaces in your life, control of your time and career will follow.

Career Resources

2009-05-02T10:07:00.000-05:00

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Divide and Conquer

2009-04-30T12:05:00.001-05:00

People are forever asking me how to handle the array of “stuff” confronting them. If you have six priority items competing for your time and attention, rank them #1 to #6. Then, tackle #1 all the way to completion, or as far as you can take it. Perhaps you have to give it to somebody else; maybe someone has to approve it or sign off on it. This should not hinder you from beginning #2.

Give each task your complete time and attention. Continue until you are finished. No method for handling six assignments is faster than the one that was just described. That is how you focus on the task at hand.

What is Information?

2009-04-07T16:31:00.000-05:00

Information: a message received and understood
Information: a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn, "statistical data"
Information: knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction

Information: that which reduces uncertainty. (Claude Shannon)
Information: that which changes us. (Gregory Bateson)
Information must be something, although the exact nature isn't clear

Information must not be a repetition of previously received message
Information must be true; a lie or false or counterfactual information is mis-information.
Information must be about something.

Managing the Beforehand

2009-04-02T06:50:00.000-05:00

During the closing days of my senior year of high school, I rounded up some of the items on the bulletin boards that I thought would make great mementos. I had a roster of all the letter winners who were invited to the awards dinner last week. I also had the daily absentee list of the senior class, several of the school's monthly news letters, and various other announcements and memos. Over the years, moving from Connecticut to Washington, DC to North Carolina, these items remained in a folder of other school items such as report cards, progress reports, and college acceptance letters.

For many reasons, my high school class did not have a five or ten of fifteen year reunion. They had one eighteen year reunion which I heard about afterwards and then another at thirty which, thankfully, I did learn about in time to attend.

In preparation for attending the thirtieth reunion, I carefully copied all my artifacts from my high school days, left the copies at home, and brought the originals with me. When I dispensed them to the class secretary and other officers, it blew them away. They made announcements during the evening of the artifacts I had so carefully preserved over the last thirty years. One of my friends, Greg, thought I was nuts.

Actually, what I had been doing was practicing the art of managing the beforehand, long before I even had defined it. It just occurred to me that someday what represented every day kinds of documents in 1969 would be highly noteworthy in 1999 or 2029.

Self-Induced Distractions

2009-03-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

More than four years ago Johns Hopkins University researchers concluded that using a cellphone -- even with a hands-free device -- may distract drivers because the brain cannot easily handle both tasks. The brain directs its resources to either visual input or auditory input, but cannot fully activate both at the same time. Despite these findings, MORE people are multi-tasking WHILE they drive.

"Our research helps explain why talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance, even when the driver is using a hands-free device," says research leader Steven Yantis, Ph.D. in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

"Directing attention to listening effectively 'turns down the volume' on input to the visual parts of the brain," he noted. "When attention is deployed to one modality -- say, in this case, talking on a cell phone -- it necessarily extracts a cost on another modality -- in this case, the visual task of driving.”

Despite these findings, MORE people are multi-tasking WHILE they drive. This is madness, pure and simple. Do you want to be on the road when such people are driving by? Do you want your children to be?

Too Much Information

2009-02-19T17:16:00.001-05:00

* More than 1,000 new magazines were launched in the U.S. in the last two years, and within two years most of them will fail.
* There are more than ten times the number of radio stations today than when televison was first introduced.
* All told, more books and articles are published in ONE day than you could comfortably read in the rest of your life.

Complexity From Birth

2009-02-18T09:37:00.001-05:00

A newborn's brain is barely composed. For the first three months of life, humans experience the neural development that soon brings smiles, clear vision, and the ability to emit approximately 432 different cries.

Make Information Choices

2009-02-02T16:08:00.001-05:00

You can become your own information switchboard. Turn off your information receptors for several hours each day. Do not let new information invade your being if it doesn't promise immediate benefits to you, your family, your community, or any area of your life -- especially if
it comes after hours.

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

Skepticism is a Virtue

2009-01-31T17:28:00.003-05:00

Michael Gartner, journalist, lawyer, and former head of NBC News suggests asking yourself the following ten questions as you read, watch, and surf:

1. Is the guest expert being paid?

2. Who posted the information? Unless this is clear, it's useless.

3. Who stated the information? Anonymous quotes don't count.

4. What was the question? In any poll, stop reading or listening if the reporter doesn't give the wording of the question, the sample size, and the date of the poll.

5. What is the answer? If an allegation is made in a story, is the reply included in the story as well? If not, it's one-sided.

6. Why should I believe you? Any opinion piece is simply that, an opinion unless the writer has incontestable facts.

7. How can I believe you? If the reporter's on a talk show, touting partisan politics, how can he/she be writing a column next week that supposed to be straight news?

8. Does anyone believe this? Absolutely ignore person-on-the-street interviews or focus group stories that purport to speak for the state or for the nation.

9. Are the words loaded? I "say," you, "allege." My friends are "associates," yours are cronies," etc.

10. Do I really care? Because the headline is large doesn't mean the issue is important.

Source: Michael Gartner

Conquer Your Filing Cabinets

2009-01-16T08:14:00.001-05:00

Studies show that 80% of the items in a typical file cabinet are never used again! That means you could pare down at least 50 percent of what you're retaining. You don't even need to go that far, however; try to pare down 20 percent.

Why do you need to pare down? In a society that throws information at us at an ever-increasing rate, it's a given that more is coming. Condition your mind that this is so.

Hooked on the Web

2009-01-06T07:51:00.003-05:00

It is hard to believe that the following article appeared three ago, since the prominence and lure of the Web has increased markedly

Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way
By Sarah Kershaw c New York Times

The waiting room for Hilarie Cash's practice has the look and feel of many a therapist's office, with soothing classical music, paintings of gentle swans and colorful flowers and on the bookshelves stacks of brochures on how to get help.

But along with her patients, Dr. Cash, who runs Internet/Computer Addiction Services here in the city that is home to Microsoft, is a pioneer in a growing niche in mental health care and addiction recovery. The patients, including Mike, 34, are what Dr. Cash and other mental health professionals call onlineaholics. They even have a diagnosis: Internet addiction disorder.

These specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical that heavy use of the Internet qualifies as a legitimate addiction, and one academic expert called it a fad illness.

Skeptics argue that even obsessive Internet use does not exact the same toll on health or family life as conventionally recognized addictions. But, mental health professionals who support the diagnosis of Internet addiction say, a majority of obsessive users are online to further addictions to gambling or pornography or have become much more dependent on those vices because of their prevalence on the Internet.

But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.

Information Without End

2008-12-23T11:54:00.003-05:00

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.

Multitasking and Your Brain

2008-12-10T06:59:00.003-05:00

“There’s substantial literature on how the brain handles multitasking. And basically, it doesn’t … what’s really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous processing,” concludes Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Awareness of What?

2008-11-21T08:31:00.003-05:00

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.

It's All a Blur

2008-10-27T18:03:00.003-05:00

Do you remember what year these major events occurred?

* Active American military involvement in Vietnam ended?
* The U.S.A. first put a man on the moon?
* The Three Mile Island mishap occurred?

Active American military involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975.
The U.S.A. first put a man on the moon in 1969.
The Three Mile Island mishap occurred in 1979.

As I explain in Breathing Space: Living & Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society, not knowing these dates doesn't mean you're not educated. Actually, it's the opposite. In a sense, you're over-educated. You know more about current affairs than most people of any previous generation. To keep events in context, you have to:

* Recognize that you can't keep up with everything. Be more conscious of where you'll offer your time and attention.

* Look for broad-based patterns to the information you receive, rather than attempt to pay attention to all manner of detail.

* Don't beat yourself up psychologically for not keeping up with every little thing. No one can, and unless you're employed by the media, there is no prize for trying.

It's official: Polls are Bogus

2008-10-13T12:14:00.006-05:00

In his illuminating book. The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls
David W. Moore, who has been praised as a "scholarly crusader" by the New York Times, reveals that "pollsters don't report public opinion, they manufacture it."

"Drawing on over a decade's experience at the Gallup Poll and a distinguished academic career in survey research, Moore describes the questionable tactics pollsters use to create poll-driven news stories-including force-feeding respondents, slanting question wording, and ignoring public ignorance on even the most arcane issues. More than proof that the numbers do lie, The
Opinion Makers clearly and convincingly spells out how urgent it is that we make polls deliver on their promise to monitor, not manipulate, the pulse of democracy.

What's worse, says the author, today's polls "report the whims rather than the will of the people due to an intrinsic methodological problem: poll results don't differentiate between those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue. Thus, respondents are compelled to provide an ill-considered, top-of-mind response because the method does not offer the option of expressing no opinion."

Moore says that forced-choice polls not only distort public opinion, they create a legitimacy spin cycle, which damages U.S. democracy...

Airplane Arrivals

2008-10-03T13:25:00.001-05:00

Information you can use: www.flightarrivals.com lets you know which planes are arriving when!