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.

 

 

To paraphrase Sir Winston, e-mail is the worst form of messaging
except for all the others that have been tried.  
Jonathan Spira

Brain Health, Stress and Overload
Information Fatigue Syndrome, is a new ‘Syndrome’ which many people are experiencing. Some symptoms include increased anxiety, sleeplessness, less leisure time and less enjoyment when we do take leisure due to multi-tasking, and our brain always working.

 Ban email, fly pigeons!  
Will Breton’s announcement set off a new trend, given that it is quite fashionable to groan about email overloads? Tech journalist Mike Arrington wrote sometime ago that he routinely declares ‘email bankruptcy’. That is, unable to cope with the thousands of emails landing in his inbox, he often closes his eyes and deletes them in one go, only to make space for the next deluge 

Company ban on email gives employees a break, and maybe a different type of headache  
In case you were too busy catching up on email last week and missed the media interest in the news, the French company Atos has banned internal email. Or will, over the next 18 months, as it phases out the tool for its employees. The company’s CEO, Thierry Breton, said that because only about 10 percent of the messages his employees receive is worth their time, and because too many of his people spend hours every night sifting through the internal e-mail they get every day, he’s getting rid of the stuff. Completely. 

Should we send work email to the trash?  
Email has moved from being the internet’s first killer app to being a productivity killer. You can make news by claiming to hate it, ban it or kill it.

London taxi drivers offer window into human brain's flexibility  
Talk about information overload: becoming a taxi driver in London means memorizing all of the sightseeing destinations the city has to offer, plus the names and locations of 25,000 streets within a six-mile (9.6 kilometer) radius. 

How To Reduce Information Overload
Yet another report has come out telling us what we pretty much already know. Many workers feel overwhelmed by the deluge of emails and information they are confronted with on a daily basis. 

What would Socrates think of Google?
I was discussing with a college student I’ve been advising whether it was a good or a bad thing that Google makes access to answers so easy. To my surprise, she opined that it’s a bad thing.

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 

 

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.

 

 

 

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.

Tips

•  Information overload: part victim, part addict You used to just about keep your chin above water, but now the inbox has topped 1GB, you haven't replied to voicemails left last week and your LinkedIn account has 20 unanswered invitations to connect.
• Jonathan B Spira | Information isn’t always knowledge There was a time when we used to be thrilled at the ease and convenience with which we could communicate through email, or google anything and have multiple pages of search results show up. But an overload of information is not always a good thing. 
• 40th Birthday of Email  It’s become a firm fixture of everyday life, loathed by some but essential to nearly all of us, and yet its future is far from certain. Email is forty years old this month. 
• How I used to handle 500+ emails a day From 1997 until 1999 I single-handedly managed the help desk forV3.com, the company I co-founded which grew to more than two million members before we sold it. I received between 500 and a thousand messages a day and replied to 95% of them within 2 hours. 
• Why ‘Data Smog’ May Be Making You Depressed We  live in the Information Age. But I’ve never heard — nor would any sane person suggest — that we live in the Useful Information Age. The modern downpour of data is largely worthless distraction, and the sheer amount is drowning us.
• Email Overload Wow! I just emptied 361 emails from my trash folder – and that was just today’s trash! I can’t possibly read all of those emails in one day, and so I must have a system in place to determine which to send directly to the trash and which to open. 
• Fixing E-mail  When this happens, I first have to search for the e-mail that I had originally sent. Sometimes that takes just a second, sometimes it takes a while. Then I have to determine whether the question or issue is still important and, if so ...
• Information overload – art is hard work When I was 17 and fell in love with reading — deep immersive reading — there existed no Cable TV, no DVD or VHS, no smartphones and, alas, no Internet .
• Too much email and a short attention spans lead to email overload Little wonder we suffer from chronic email overload when you consider how much email is flying around and how short is our attention span.  
• Conquering the Email burden A recent study at Columbia University concludes that a process of widespread neural rewiring has already begun its inexorable course. Dr. Betsy Sparrow, the lead author of the research report, believes that search engines like Google have made us less reliant on our own memory for recalling information. 
• How To Finally Escape Information Overload (Part 1) Take a minute to count up your inboxes – all the little spots where your actionable items gather. You’ll be surprised at how many you have: your desk at the office, your desk at home, the passenger seat in your car, your dining room table, your multiple email inboxes, your voicemail, your text message inbox, sticky notes on your monitor, the whiteboard on the wall, etc. How many do you have – 10? 20?

Statistics

• A quarter of us now expect response to email within an hour more 
• 67% of small business owners are holding back on investing in social media because of fear of overload more

Wisdom

• Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive  - George Dyson

 

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.

Tips

• Don't Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! more
• Stop the Insanity: How To Crush Communication Overload more
• Communication Overload: A Simple Technique more
• Information overload more
• Nine Easy Ways To Eliminate E-mail Overload more
• Solving information overload: the role of manual content curation more
• Tech Talk: Tips for managing your information overload more
• New social media? Same old, same old, say Stanford experts more

Statistics

• 59% of respondants say that the amount of info they have to process at work has increased since the economic downturn more

Wisdom

• True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information. Winston Churchill

 

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.

Tips

• Avoid Email Overload more Advice for those who love coupon and deal emails.
• What's the best way to avoid email overload? more
• 5 email personalities that clog up your inbox more Which are you?
• How I hacked myself to overcome information overload stress more A graphic demonstration of how the brain works.
• Information overload produces unhealthy behavior for many dealing with technology more
• Email overload, Twitter updates, monster slippers... Top 10 ways to avoid distractions at work more
• Only Child gets serious about prioritizing more
• Are you overwhelmed or have information overload? more

Statistics

• Daily activity for Facebook - 60 million upates. Twitter - 140 million tweets per day. Email - 188 billion messages. more
• 25% of avg day is spent dealing with overload-related issues - ie: interruptions, excessive e-mails & failed searches more

Wisdom

• Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives - William James
• He who knows much about others may be learned, but he who understands himself is more intelligent - Lao Tse

 

 

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.

Tips

• ARRRRGH! Dealing with Information Overload more
• The Next Step in 'Digital Lifestyle Management': Applications as Personal Assistant more
• Is Information Overload Your Problem? more
• Why E-mail is Like Oil more
• Information Overload Day 20 October 2011 - reduce email overload more
• What is the best way to communicate? more
• How to Avoid Information Overload more
• The Real Point of Visualizations: more

Statistics

• Search-based users find what they are looking for in an average of 18 seconds; folder-based users take almost a minute more

Wisdom

• He who knows much about others may be learned, but he who understands himself is more intelligent - Lao Tse

 

 

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.

Tips

• Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email more
• 11 Tips: Dealing with Information Overload more
• Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now more
• E-Hoarding Is Unhealthy more
• Managing Digital Information Overload – Is Technology The Cause & The Cure? more
• BlackBerry crumble reveals the depth of our email addiction more
• Top 10 Tricks for Dealing With Email Overload more
• Lightening the load on your email inbox: Five tips more
• The Secret to Avoiding Email Overload: Canned Responses more

Statistics

• 40% of Tablet and Smartphone Owners Use Them While Watching TV more
• Sheer overload” is reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, followed closely by “Finding and recovering past emails” and “Keeping track of actions. more
• 25% of all time spent online is devoted to social media more

Wisdom

• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending - Maria Robinson

 

 

Workers across the planet admit to being overwhelmed by the voracious volume of work-related information they have to consume and digest via e-mail and other information collection systems. Information has to be taken in, but how it is processed, organized and made useful is up for serious debate, say corporate employees. What is the consequence? The quality of their work is suffering say 62 percent of workers, according to a study on productivity of 1,700 white collar employees in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia and South Africa by LexisNexis. Almost 60 percent of workers have noticed a dramatic increase in information since the downturn in the world economy, with a good amount of that information being viewed as primarily useless. "Workers across the globe are just about managing to keep their heads above water in a rising tide of information," said Michael Walsh, CEO of U.S. Legal Markets at LexisNexis. "The results of this survey reveal not just how widespread the problem is, but also the very real impact that information overload has on professionals' productivity and the bottom line. Employers need to do more than simply toss their workers a life preserver and hope for the best." Half of all the workers in these countries believe they are near their breaking points with information, and just over half are demoralized by not being able to manage it all. In the United States, 92 percent of workers have to search for old e-mails every week. In Australia, 58 percent of workers say they experience weekly disagreements with co-workers on how to best manage and organize information. Information overload is not constrained by the workplace. A 2008 study from the University of California, San Diego found Americans consume 100,000 words in non-work-related information, or about 34 gigabytes, on average daily. The study found between 1980 and 2008 bytes consumed in television, gaming and Internet-centric information increased by 350 percent, for an annual rate increase of 5.4 percent. With all that information, workers are admitting their consternation on the job. An astonishing number of employees in the United States—90 percent—report their companies could do more to help better manage information in the workplace, said the LexisNexis study. Eighty-two percent of workers across all five countries in this study say they want information-centric software to function more closely to the way they actually work. "The bad news is that wherever you find knowledge workers around the world, you'll also find information overload," Walsh said in the same statement. “Businesses that really come to grips with this problem could gain a competitive advantage over companies that do not.” Source: LexisNexis

Setting up Email Filters is a widely adopted  method to tackle information overload. E-mail filters can block spam, or junk e-mail, and other unwanted e-mail messages by automatically deleting them. Filters can also be used to sort incoming messages into particular folders.  Here is how you can set it up in Taroby: 1. Login to Taroby with your username and password. 2. Locate the Filters by Clicking the Config Button on the menu bar. 3. Click the Filter and choose the email account for which you're creating the Filter. Type the name of the new filter such as "Junk E-mail." and hit the save button.  On Saving the Filter Name, a new window pops up where you can set the conditions or rules for the filter, and the action it should perform. 4. Enter the filter conditions, or "rules." Conditions are requirements the e-mail must meet (for example, the sender is Joe Smith or the subject includes the words "Make Money Fast!") in order for the action (such as Moving Message to "Junk E-Mail" Folder) to take place.  You can save multiple conditions for your filter, and also choose whether all the conditions must be fulfilled or not. Here I've choose the option "Minimum One Condition" so that the action is performed for any condition. 5. Select the action you want the program to perform with filtered e-mail. You can move it to another folder, or request other actions, such as Mark as Junk, Mark as Read, Assign To, Copy Message To, Delete etc. 6. Click on the Save button at the bottom to save your new filter.