Research firm: Workers suffer from ‘information overload’
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 26, 2007 at 10:58am
E-mail copying has contributed to an “information overload” that is making workers less productive, according to a report by the Basex business research firm. In fact, the company has named “information overload” as the problem of the year.
“It’s too much information. It’s too many interruptions. It’s too much lost time,” Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira told Wired. “It’s always too much of a good thing.”
Information overload isn’t new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine, he told Wired.
Workers get disoriented every time they stop what they are doing to reply to an e-mail or answer a follow-up phone call because they didn’t reply within minutes. Spira said workers can spend 10 to 20 times the length of the original interruption trying to get back on track.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
