If you share our passion, please join us there! Reserve your place by registering here. We look forward to meeting you in what promises to be a productive, interesting and (not least) fun coming together of like minds.

Nathan Zeldes is the president of the Information Overload Research Group.

Over the past 14 years, the amount of stuff (the only word that really describes it) that could conceivably fall into these categories has expanded exponentially.  As a result, Basex:TechWatch became somewhat bloated and almost doubled in size.

Given our increased focus on the problem of Information Overload in recent years, we have decided to put Basex:TechWatch on a diet of sorts.  We will do this by sharpening our focus around knowledge sharing and collaboration with an eye towards tools that could help knowledge workers deal in a better manner with the burden of too much information.

An example of this is the dramatic increase in the number of mobile devices such as smartphones that seem to come onto the market each week.  Since the difference between many of these devices is minimal, we have reduced our coverage accordingly and will only include those which we feel are innovative and relevant to the topic at hand.

This won’t happen overnight but we do think you’ll find the new, slimmed-down Basex:TechWatch to be more on topic and even more useful in providing you with a quick overview of new products, offerings, services, and updates that have been announced in the preceding week.

We’ll continue to work to fine tune Basex:TechWatch, and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to e-mail us at btwsuggest@basex.com.

Click here if you would like to sign up for a free subscription to  Basex:TechWatch.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Lower the Overload, send less e-mail

Information Overload Awareness Day (IOAD) continued the dialog I sought to begin three years ago with the first IOAD.

To be candid, for the past few months, I’ve been a bit overloaded as have my colleagues at Basex and we were considering on moving IOAD to December.

We were therefore surprised a few weeks ago when we noticed articles announcing that Information Overload Awareness Day 2011 would be on October 20 once again.  A phone conversation I had with Marsha Egan, who runs the aptly named InBoxDetox.com and has supported IOAD all three years, was enlightening to say the least.  It’s ironic, Marsha pointed out, that we are so overloaded that we couldn’t even turn off IOAD.

I had created IOAD but by year three, it had taken on a life of its own.

To “celebrate” IOAD, I asked knowledge workers around the world to send 10% fewer e-mail messages each day.  E-mail by itself is just one manifestation of Information Overload but it may well be the poster child.  I was pleased to see countless bloggers and journalists pick up the call this year and ask their readers to Lower the Overload by sending fewer electronic missives.

I’ve done a lot of speaking about Information Overload in the past few months and I just returned from Scottsdale, Arizona, where I spoke at a meeting of the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection.  The meeting specifically addressed Cybersecurity Through A Behavioral Lens and I was asked to speak about Information Overload.

It was a gratifying talk in part because the Q&A that followed almost didn’t end (it eventually had to end because many of the participants had flown out that same day and were still on east coast time and my keynote followed the dinner hour) and in part because the attendees were some of the leading thinkers in the field.  As it turned out, the behavioral observations my colleagues and I were making about Information Overload had great applicability to cybersecurity issues and the questions and discussion largely centered on building a bridge between the two disciplines.

It turns out that even cybersecurity experts and academicians in this field are not immune to the problems of Information Overload and this group in particular related to the story told to me by Col. Peter Marksteiner of the rogue e-mail that was forwarded and forwarded until it brought down the e-mail servers at Maxwell Air Force Base – during a cybersecurity event there in June 2008.

If you haven’t yet started to Lower the Overload, you can still take stock of your own information habits and take the first step by sending fewer e-mail messages to fewer recipients.  If we all do this, it will make a difference.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Where do I even start...

Today is the third annual Information Overload Awareness Day (some media outlets have shortened this to Information Overload Day, which in my view gives it an entirely different spin).

To “celebrate,”  we at Basex invite each and every one of you to Lower the Overload starting now.

Some may ask, why do we need an Information Overload Awareness Day?  We need it because we don’t have days that are free from the problem.  Our research shows that only 5% of the knowledge workers’ day is available for thought and reflection.  The largest single block of time in the average day (25%) is spent dealing with Information Overload-related issues, such as interruptions, excessive e-mails, and failed searches.

We need Information Overload Awareness Day because the problem is getting worse, not better.  For us to even begin to regain our lost productivity, scattered focus, and decimated work/life balance, the first thing that must happen is for every one of us to acknowledge the problem, and then take action.

We need Information Overload Awareness Day because Information Overload is dulling our senses and limiting our ability to absorb more in-depth and complex thoughts and content.

Last year, we asked all knowledge workers to attempt to send 10% fewer e-mail messages.  This year, we ask knowledge workers to reaffirm that pledge.  If you have lapsed, please try again. If you’ve succeeded, try to commit to further reducing the quantity of e-mail you send.

We’ve made great progress in raising awareness of Information Overload’s impact.  My book Overload!: How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization was published a few months ago.  It outlines the problem of Information Overload and shows us how we all can make a difference through our individual actions.

We’ve also expanded the conversation to include a variety of great thinkers and writers.  In June, in an online roundtable sponsored by the Information Overload Research Group, we brought together Dave Crenshaw (The Myth of Multitasking), Daniel Forrester (Consider), Maggie Jackson (Distracted), and William Powers (Hamlet’s BlackBerry).

Just recently, I spoke at Google’s headquarters (talk about being inside the lion’s den) to Google employees about the problem (yes, they have it there too) and I’ve been speaking at conferences and meetings almost on a weekly basis (next Tuesday, I’ll be in Philadelphia speaking at a Wharton event).

Organizations that include Google, the Churchill Club, Dow Jones, and Berkeley University invited me to speak and join in Information Overload-focused events that have helped spread the word and raise awareness like never before.

Information Overload cost theU.S.economy $997 billion in 2010 – and that figure continues to grow as we approach 2012.

Help Lower the Overload (our slogan for Information Overload Awareness Day) on Thursday and beyond. Remember, even without your knowing it, your actions impact others so do what you can. Remember, we are all in this together.

People frequently ask me if there is an easy fix for Information Overload, a corporate pill as it were.  While such a thing does not exist, I do know that simply raising awareness of the problem and its ramifications does help begin to reduce the amount of overload we face.  In addition, each of us can and should assume a bit of personal responsibility for the problem and take the appropriate steps to mitigate it.

I have.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Ready, set, ...

On Thursday October 20, knowledge workers around the world will mark the third annual Information Overload Awareness Day.  The theme is “Lower the Overload.”  The holiday/observance is our attempt to raise awareness of the crippling burden that Information Overload places on all of us.  Thanks to the vast amount of information that we all face on a daily basis, individual knowledge workers, teams, and entire organizations suffer diminished productivity and the loss of the ability to make sound decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks.

Information Overload Awareness Day is an opportunity for knowledge workers and organizations to take stock of the impact that this serious problem is having on their productivity and work life balance, not to mention on their organizations’ bottom line.

One thing we have discovered as we have researched Information Overload is how easy it is to take steps to lessen its impact by simply raising awareness of the problem.  Information Overload Awareness Day is in part a day to step back and contemplate how our individual actions contribute to the problem.

On Thursday, we will ask everyone to start by sending 10% fewer e-mail messages (this includes copying fewer people on the e-mail you do send).

Two simple statistics from my book Overload! how Too Much Information Is Hazadous To Your Organization explain why this is important:

- Reading and processing just 100 e-mail messages can occupy over half of a worker’s day.

- For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an e-mail, eight hours are lost.

In addition, look at how you use and share information and you may see opportunities to make processes more efficient as well as take action to improve your own information habits, such as in the area of search.

Information Overload cost the U.S.economy $997 billion in 2010 – and that figure will increase for 2011.

Help Lower the Overload (our slogan for Information Overload Awareness Day) on Thursday and beyond.   Remember, even without your knowing it, your actions impact others so do what you can.  Remember, we are all in this together.

But where is the RIGHT information?

This essay is being written after numerous and somewhat frustrating encounters with the latest information technology.  One would think that we’ve reached a point where systems and computers should work flawlessly but that is less and less the case every day.

On the one hand, the Information Revolution of the late 20th century has resulted in an anywhere, anytime information society that has become accustomed to boundless gobs of information on demand.

On the other hand, no one has said that the stuff works.

From a technical standpoint, the advent of true ubiquitous computing (or at least, state-of-the-art ca. 2011) has markedly changed our attitude towards and interactions with information.  Our constant exposure to information leads us to have the expectation that it will be shared across systems, accurately and quickly.  If Facebook and Google can keep track of everything we are reading, sharing, and writing while we surf the Web, surely everyone else can too, right?

Unfortunately, information does not always get to where it needs to be.  I’ll use my recent experience with an airline as an example.   Airlines are known to be leaders in IT; American Airlines introduced the first ever computer reservation system, Sabre, in 1960.  At the time it was one of the largest and most successful mainframe deployments ever.

Today, despite tremendous advances in technology over the course of 50 years, information often fails us.  Calls to customer service representatives at call centers asking the same or similar questions yield widely disparate answers, despite the fact that the agent is being guided by the system.

My own experiences in the past week relating to several different issues with an airline, including an error that was apparently computer generated as well as misinformation that was repeated by several agents almost verbatim, show me that we have a long way to go.

It won’t surprise you to learn that fixing these problems took multiple phone calls and e-mail messages and wasted hours of time both on my part and on the part of the call center agents.

We used to say that computers don’t make mistakes, but rather that the people who write the programs do.  I believe that this belief has become somewhat quaint if not obsolete.  While we are far from enjoying true artificial intelligence where machines actually think and respond on their own, we are at a point where autonomic or self-healing systems do evolve on their own, and sometimes seem to add in mistakes just to keep things interesting.

We want the right information on demand, without delay, without error.   As we add in more information, more systems, and more ways of getting information, what we end up with is something very different.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Bow-ties: classy and helpful for understanding Information Overload

Information Overload is something that most knowledge workers understand intuitively.  We all know what it feels like to stare at an overflowing inbox not unlike a deer in headlights, or to sit at your desk wracking your brain trying to remember the location of an important bit of information.

Unfortunately, although it is easy to recall the feeling of Information Overload, visualizing and conceptualizing it is much more difficult.  We get hung up in definitions, specific technologies, and different approaches to dealing with the problem, and as a result, often fail to see what the problem looks like on a simplified, macro level.  We understand what Information Overload is, but fail to see the forest for the trees.

To help visualize the complex information flows that every knowledge worker and every organization must navigate, I often use the metaphor of a bow-tie.  This helps me to understand and conceptualize Information Overload, and it may be helpful to you as well.  To start, simply picture the shape of a bow-tie (yes, the fancy one that goes around the neck).

On the left side of the bow-tie is the complex incoming information in the form of communications, news and reports, meetings, and any other information input, no matter how small.  This flow includes sources both internal and external to the organization that are filtered down and processed in the middle of the bow-tie, the knot.  The knot is where the complex flow of information is reduced, simplified, and digested so that it can be used to produce complex outcomes on the other side of the knot.  The right side of the bow-tie is where the structured and digested information is applied to business problems and used to create profit and gain advantage.

The bow-tie is a powerful model because it allows for complex inputs to be reduced to manageable blocks that are then used to drive complex outcomes.  The problem is that the knot of the bow-tie, and by extension the organization, team, or individual knowledge worker, is vulnerable to becoming overloaded.  If the knot fails and is overwhelmed by the incoming information on the left side, then the important outcomes being produced on the right side will suffer.

For example, imagine a knowledge worker (sitting in the middle, at the knot) who is dealing with too much information in the form of extremely high numbers of search results (the incoming information on the left-hand side of the bow-tie).  The combination of his inadequate search tools and techniques leads him to becoming overwhelmed.  As a result, he is not able to find the information he is looking for, and he moves forward with his project using sub-standard information.  The project (the output on the right-hand side of the bow-tie) ends up having to be redone and reviewed many more times than necessary because of the errors.  If the problem at the knot could have been avoided, the significant time and effort that was spent fixing the errors would have been saved.

On a group level, a sales team that is receiving an overwhelming amount of e-mail will be unable to effectively process the incoming information, leading to the team missing promising sales leads.  The team’s failure to maximize the information they are receiving leads to the outputs that are produced being not up-to-par, in this case resulting in lower sales.  The problem in this case is the team’s ability to process the high volume of e-mail effectively; resolving that pain point would improve the output and drive to higher sales.

Now, I don’t expect anyone to start wearing bow-ties because of this Information Overload visualization technique (although they are very stylish and perhaps underused).  Nonetheless, applying this metaphor to areas where Information Overload is harming productivity and impacting an organization’s bottom line may help to understand the problem and focus efforts to address it.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

Are we there yet?

The ability to do one thing on autopilot while doing something else is referred to as automaticity. While experienced drivers can hold conversations and listen to the radio while driving, novice drivers cannot. Indeed, many new drivers turn off the radio and ask passengers not to talk to them. They also don’t make phone calls or try to send text messages.

Automaticity does not mean that distractions – while driving or otherwise – do not have an impact. Brain scans by neuroscientists studying this issue have shown that the brain has difficulty paying attention to sights and sounds at the same time. If the brain is focused on a visual task, its ability to handle an auditory task decreases markedly, and vice versa.

In the course of writing my book Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization, I attempted to determine the impact of distractions and replicated an experiment that NPR had conducted a few years earlier. I played the piano.

Playing the piano involves a similar amount of hand-to-eye coordination as well as coordination between hands and feet (for pedals, in both cases). Playing the piano also has a similar amount of automaticity as driving. I have played the piano since I was five years old and I have been driving since the age of 16. Even when I am out of practice, I can still sit down and play many of the Beethoven Sonatas I memorized for performances years earlier.

Essentially, I played the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and had a friend ask me increasingly complex questions. Being asked simple arithmetic questions threw off my tempo completely. It was impossible to play Beethoven’s intricate arpeggios and do simple arithmetic simultaneously.

Recently, I came across a video prepared by Farmers Insurance as part of its University of Farmers online efforts. Hosted by Prof. Nathaniel Burke, who is portrayed by actor J.K Simmons, the Distracted Driving video cites some statistics (distracted driving “accounts for 25% of car crashes”) and some root causes (“music, cellphones, food”). It shows a man driving while an increasing number of distractions appear, including a boom box located directly behind the driver’s head, a drink being spilled on the driver, a few people poking the driver with long sticks, and a mobile phone.

After a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt jumps into the car and starts dancing in his seat, the car (not unsurprisingly) crashes.

While most drivers don’t face this number of distractions on a regular basis, the video (which is 30 seconds in length) does an excellent job of driving home the point that, simply put, distractions distract. Given that a typical knowledge worker may be subject to almost as many distractions while at his desk as the Farmers Insurance driver faces in the video, it’s amazing we’re able to get any work done at all.

The View from the Eighth Floor

Though the storm packed a good punch, with strong winds and heavy rain, it never reached the potential that meteorologists had forecast. Indeed, wind speeds reached 80 mph (128 km/h) at times but, in general, sustained winds were(according to news reports) at most in the 60 mph (96 km/h) range and generally far lower.

Some storm-related preparatory tasks were relatively easy, such as removing all of the outdoor furniture from my terrace (and hoped that neighbors, especially those living on higher floors, had done the same). After reading that the FBI told its employees to make sure to place papers and files inside desk drawers so that they wouldn’t fly out if office windows broke, I moved all papers (what happened to the Paperless Society?) away to safety. I thought about taping the windows but, apparently, prevailing wisdom has shifted away from this so I decided that the shades and blinds would have to protect against possible broken glass.

Experts on television and radio were telling apartment dwellers to stay away from windows if they lived on the 10th floor or higher since the higher you go, the stronger the wind gusts get. One of my criteria for living on the eighth floor of my high-rise condo was that the fire department ladders didn’t go much higher. Now I had another reason.

Then there was water. In the event of a power failure, the pumps that supply water in taller buildings won’t work. I filled five larger pots just to be safe. I already had plenty of bottled water to drink so that part was covered.

Now came the hard part, namely news and information. If the power went out, my main Internet connection (Verizon FiOS) would also go down (although the FiOS connection does have battery backup, it is intended to keep voice services up and running for up to eight hours, but not data). I made the switch to Internet radio years ago and migrated my last battery-operated radio (a shower radio) to Wi-Fi last year. There’s got to be a battery operated radio here somewhere…

It turns out I actually had two. One is a battery-operated Radio Shack weather radio, the other a small battery-operated clock radio. Of course the clock-radio hadn’t been touched in years, the batteries had been left in way too long and had corroded but, after a quick cleaning, it worked reasonably well with new batteries.

Now onto ensuring a modicum of Internet connectivity. My new HTC Sensation phone has a built-in 4G hotspot and I also have a Clear 4G hotspot. I charged both and also made sure any other mobile phones I had lying around well charged as well. My Apple iPad was already fully charged and I would need its ten-hour battery life if the power went out (I made sure that the most recent issues of the Economist and other newspapers and magazines had been downloaded, to minimize the need for Internet connectivity. Finally, I also charged my Nikon D90 DSLR in case a photo opportunity presented itself (it didn’t but one never knows).

It turns out that television news about hurricanes is highly addicting when you are in the path of the storm. Based on the dearth of my friends’ Facebook posts, I would say that most of them were watching the news as well. Unlike what I heard right after the earthquake (which shook Washington and New York and was centered in Virginia) where there were reports that there had been 5,000 Twitter posts per second, I heard no such stats being bandied about during Irene. In fact, the news media seemed downright serious about the coverage and reportage was in many respects at its best, demonstrating the power and often-overlooked value of old media.

Indeed, during severe storms and power failures, when cell sites and towers go down and wireless data becomes unreliable, AM radio, which first came into existence in 1906, and broadcast television, which came into widespread use in the 1940s, are still the media to which almost everyone turns

More than 1.3 million people are without power in the tri-state area as I write this. At one point, the Long Island Power Authority was reporting that 25% of its customers were impacted by a blackout. As I write this, the skies are brightening although cloudy with occasional sprinkles. The flood warnings continue for the tri-state area as rivers and lakes continue to rise and it will take days to restore power to millions of people along the eastern seaboard so we are not quite out of the woods yet, but the forecast for radio and television news is for clear skies.

What channel is it on?

On Monday, the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) hosted a virtual literary salon on the topic of Information Overload entitled “Five Authors, Five Books, A Dialogue on Information Overload.” The event featured authors who have written recent books related to the subject of Information Overload. They were asked to discuss why they wrote their books, and what issues they feel are most relevant today.

Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking, spoke about the problem of switch tasking, which describes what happens when people switch back and forth rapidly between tasks, lowering their productivity. Crenshaw suggested several strategies for dealing with Information Overload, including setting definite start and end times for work in order to increase the productivity of work-designated times, learning to say no to new projects, and avoiding the “Double Q” (just one quick question). The Double Q is particularly vexing as those kinds of questions cause multiple small interruptions. The best way to deal with the problem is to group all the little question into a single one-to-one meeting, avoiding the steady stream of small interruptions.

Daniel Forrester, author of Consider, mentioned that he was motivated to write his book in part by reading about how Bill Gates would schedule “Think Weeks” for thought and reflection twice a year. At the time, he was also questioning how multitasking was affecting his own life and reading research that proved that multitasking was largely impossible. Forrester went on to outline how he began looking at information-related military issues in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the leadership style of different leaders such as David Petraeus and Colin Powell. He noted that we are still not spending enough time thinking and reflecting, saying that he believes the most successful companies and individuals will be those who engage in what he called “group reflection” as opposed to group think.

Next, Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted, outlined her argument that we risk heading into a Dark Age due to our lack of deep thinking, excessive work/life balance degradation, and a drop in listening skills. She outlined the three types of attention, namely focus, awareness, and executive attention, and how people can be trained either to be distracted or to be focused. She finished with a call to action to question our assumptions and values about how we think about attention, with a shift back to emphasizing focused thought and setting up our environments to support deep thought and reflection.

William Powers, author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry, spoke about his realization of how the medium through which we consume information, namely screens, shapes our lives. Prior to writing his book, he had begun to notice that it became difficult to get through more than a few pages in a good novel before feeling the urge to look at a screen. Powers discussed how he went back to historical moments when humans faced technological challenges, and found practical examples of people dealing with information consumption and striking healthy balances in their lives. He concluded that we all have to realize the benefits of finding a healthy balance and setting limits on information consumption.

To finish the discussion, Jonathan Spira, author of Overload!, discussed the evolution of his research into Information Overload over the last 20 years. His starting point emerged from his observations of the problems that occur when knowledge workers share information and collaborate, almost all of them Information Overload-related. This led him on a 20-year journey to address these issues and help people deal with the problem. He outlined the phenomenon of recovery time, which is the time it takes a knowledge worker to return to the task at hand after an interruption (five to ten times the length of the interruption itself). Jonathan also shared some statistics on how widespread the problem is: for example, 94% of knowledge workers have felt overwhelmedto the point of incapacitation by the amount of information they encounter on a daily basis. His parting thought was that we can all do something about Information Overload by taking personal responsibility for the problem and taking action in whatever ways we can, such as by sending clearer e-mail, or by valuing our colleagues’ time as if it were our own.

Jonathan, who was also serving as moderator, ended the event three minutes early and told attendees that he was hereby returning three additional minutes to them for the purpose of thought and reflection.

The entire event, including a question and answer session, can be heard in its entirety here.

This Analyst Opinion is also available online at

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex. He can be reached at cburke@basex.com