Pardon my drumbeat: Information Overload is too expensive.
A brief programming note: Whether or not, as the analyst quoted here suggests, the business problem of the year for 2008 will be information overload, you can certainly expect me to keep harping on it. The more I read about our short attention spans and our overloaded days, the more I’m convinced that the willing subjection to information overload is a major limiter of success.
Category: The working life3 Comments so far
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Kudos on calling out the “willing subjection” to information overload. It’s not the presence of the information itself that’s a killer; it’s our willingness to bury ourselves (or our unthinking, reflexive self-interment) in the vast ocean of unnecessary minutia that dooms us.
Just because scientists can now make a glow-in-the-dark mouse (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/343929.stm) doesn’t mean that they should. And just because we can easily subscribe to 600 RSS feeds a day doesn’t mean that we should, either.
Paring down the information we receive so that we actually have time to *think* about it is far more important than simply ingesting vast quantities of techno-blather.
Dan — Good points. I would add this: just because scientists can make a glow-in-the-dark mouse doesn’t mean I need to surf until I find the story-du-jour along the lines of “Scientists Breed Glow-In-the-Dark Mouse.”
[...] Markovitz made this comment on my information overload post of the other day: Paring down the information we receive so that we actually have time to *think* [...]