Larry Magid: Struggling with information overload

 

 

Magid: Struggling with information overload

By Larry Magid

for the Mercury News

August 1, 2011

 

Like many of you reading this, I have to deal with a constant barrage of emails along with tweets, Facebook messages, text messages and now Google (GOOG)+ updates. And that's on top of my landline and cellphone ringing as well as my dog needing attention and the usual interruptions from family members.

I work at home. People who work in an office often have to deal with colleagues stopping by asking, "Do you have 30 seconds?"

Well, even if that interruption really is only for 30 seconds, recovery time turns out to be between 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption, according to Jonathan Spira, the chief analyst at Basex and author of "Overload: How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization."

Spira, a panelist at a Churchill Club event last week appropriately titled "Information Overload 2.0," said it "takes time for the neurons to fire and it takes time for you to regain your thoughts and recapture the flow of what you were thinking." And sometimes, he added, what's lost cannot be recaptured.

Full article available here.