Information Overload Awareness Day

email

I get up at 6:00 am, turn the coffee pot on (I get it ready the night before, so I have a fresh, hot cup of coffee in 3 minutes or less). At 6:05ish, I sit down at my desk, and for the next 30 minutes I'm reading emails, prioritizing emails, deleting emails, and responding to any that require immediate responses.

And as I said, this is just in the first 30 minutes of my day. This same routine happens several times a day. I really need to learn how to let emails go (at least a little).

Here's some stats from the Information Overload Day site:

  • A minimum of 28 billion hours is lost each year to Information Overload in the United States.


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


  • It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30 second interruption.
  • 

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


  • 58 percent of government workers spend half the workday filing, deleting, or sorting information, at an annual cost of almost $31 billion dollars.


  • 66 percent of knowledge workers feel they don’t have enough time to get all of their work done.


  • 94 percent of those surveyed have felt overwhelmed by information at some point to the point of incapacitation.

I find that I have to remember so many things — passwords, phone numbers, dates, appointments, and on and on. It's just too much! You know what I mean?  I found this infographic that sounded all to familiar to me:

2301 infographic w587
via


So for today, I am going to try to be a little more relaxed and not stress out over all the things that I need to do. It will be here tomorrow.

11 Comments

  1. I know what you mean! I often find myself reading an email when the phone is ringing, my husband is texting me, my kids are all demanding something at once and the doorbell rings….definitely an overload, lol.

  2. @Tammy – I’m glad your on the mend! 🙂

  3. I’m not going to say I have info overload (an info overlord…) but if I don’t know everything that is going on in the world everyday, I feel like I am missing something. The problem is they are making 24 hours of news every day, and I have to spend at least 12 hours to read it all, even if I just skim headlines.

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