Impact on Information Overload
Particularly since the late 1990s there has been a growing interest in developing tools for the needs of personal information management, in order to filter email messages for example [14–17]. In this context, the findings of research projects such as ‘How to keep found things found’ [18–19] have led us to think about how information resources could be managed more effectively by identifying ‘hits’, that is, the most useful information sources, and avoiding the storage of useless information. [1]
The main impact on information overload was found to be through the individual's ability to deal with the information received. The capability to deal with messages and information requests whilst on the move or from a remote location tends to have a 'smoothing' effect on the individual's information processing. Rather than deal with a barrage of messages following time away from the office, users are able to deal with the more important communications remotely. Thus, users are able to 'stay on top of things'. [3]
Differentiating Important Information
What is important is also determined by the pressures and demands of the information environment and the organizational context. Organization norms of conduct will also serve to control the way virtual work is undertaken (Nolan and Galal 1998). [3]
People tend to stop information seeking at the point where a good enough solution has been found with regard to their information needs or interests at hand (cf.25). [1]
Tackling Overload
Given the limitations of the memory span (seven plus or minus two), individuals processing information try to cope with the eventual overload by drawing on adjustment strategies such as queuing (delaying during peak load periods hoping to catch up later) or filtering (leaving some types of information unprocessed, according to some scheme of priorities) [11]. [1]
(1) to be dealt with immediately;
(2) to be followed up when time permits;
(3) to be noted and filed for possible future reference; and
(4) to be discarded or ignored [13, p. 46]. [1]
What is needed for tackling overload
Technological Solutions
- Better, smarter search engines. Search should go beyond full-text searches and allow large search results to be easily further refined or filtered.
- Better email management. The various rules or filters in Microsoft Outlook help to better manage email. Remove yourself from unnecessary listservs. Avoid the temptation to constantly check PDA.
- RSS feeds.
- Design. Help information retrieval. [14]
Human Solutions
- Time management. Should be important to teach in schools.
- Stress management. Give your brains a break every now and then.
- Training/information literacy. Learning how to evaluate information sources and organize information is extremely important.
- Annotations, taxonomies, analysis.
- Culture. Sharing information. [14]
Strategies for Coping with Information Overload
There are 2 strategies :
- Filtering strategy, based on systematic attempts to weed out useless information from sources that are chosen for use.
- Withdrawal strategy that aims at keeping the number of daily information sources at a minimum in order to shelter oneself from the excessive bombardment of information. The basic difference
The basic difference between these strategies is that the filtering approach focuses on information content, while the withdrawal strategy operates on a more general level and primaly directs attention to information sources that should be avoided. [1]
The Filtering Strategy
The filtering approach may be used differently, depending on the type of source used. n the context of networked sources, this approach is necessary. [1]
Email overload
- deleting immediately spam messages
- boredom to certain subjects in media all over causes people to ignore them[1]
- PULL - the filtering strategy and the pull share the information sources of other types.
- PUSH - also serves the needs of the filtering strategy because accurate search profiles help to weed out the supply of marginal information sources. [1]
The Withdrawal Strategy
Main idea is to protect user from excessive information bombardment in order to retain peace of mind and avoiding the media [1]
These strategies may complement each other and that in practice information seekers employ a mixed strategy to cope with information overload.
If an individual craves information, the problem of information overload will certainly be there. [1]
Programs to use for tackling information overload
Mr. Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering new Internet companies, wrote a post about the persistent problem of e-mail overload and the opportunity for an entrepreneur to devise a solution, almost 200 comments were posted within two days. Some start-up companies were mentioned favorably, like ClearContext (sorts Outlook inbox messages by imputed importance), Xobni (offers a full communications history within Outlook for every sender, as well as very fast searching), Boxbe (restricts incoming e-mail if the sender is not known), and RapidReader (displays e-mail messages, a single word at a time, for accelerated reading speeds that can reach up to 950 words a minute). But none of these services really eliminates the problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies. And a recurring theme in many comments was that Mr. Arrington was blind to the simplest solution: a secretary. [2]
That personal touch is sorely missed in the e-mail replies we receive from large companies. Customer service automation subjects a message to semantic analysis to extract its general meaning, then dispatches a canned answer at the least possible cost. It aims to provide a “close enough” reply; it does not provide reassuring words conveyed by one human to another. [2]
Mr. Cuban and Mr. Arrington likewise could resort to a technological solution, preparing an auto-response for their public e-mail accounts that would warn strangers that the volume of e-mail precluded even a skimming, let alone dispatching responses. Yet both have resisted that course. [2]
Few Easy Solutions for Coping with Information Overload
The Pen and Paper Resolve
One example of handling information overload is quite simple, though a huge workload. Schwartz writes in his article how information technology have failed on him and made him frustrated. [12]
Schwartz is a doctor and he has collected a lot of information starting from 1964. He calls himself a "cutter and saver"; he had a huge amount of articles cut out of journals. This information was a huge overload since it was not organized in any way. After he was forced to stay at home for recovering from a surgery, he started to handle information overload. He had the relevant articles cut out, kept, read and discussed. Now he took the next step, he made a recollection of details. [12]
According to Schwartz, all the papers have a kind of "bottom line" that can be summarized in one or two sentences. Nowadays he summarizes all the relevant articles into a booklet which he carries around with him. It is a lot of work to create such but at least you don´t have to boot it every once in a while, it is always at hand and easy to read (no font-issues). And it is nice and simple to carry along. [12]
This way of handling information overload also trains the mind for always searching for the "bottom line" from articles. It is easier to become better educated and more empowered. [12]
Some Old Ways to Handle Information
People have been complaining about information overload since the 1200’s, though especially after the implementation of Gutenberg’s printing press. Since then there has also bee ways to handle information, some are useful even today. [14]
- The design and layout of information, navigating through the source. For example the incipit to mark the start of textual passages, tables of contents, page numbering and alphabetical indices.
- A search engine. An early version could be the bookwheel, invented in 1588 by Agostino Ramelli.
- A commonplace book, nowadays blogs and wikis.
- Encyclopedias.
- Taxonomies and maps. During the Renaissance the number of plants being identified by botanists increased vastly; new taxonomies were needed to classify the large amount of information.
- Marginalia. [14]
KM Tips and Techniques to Combat Information Overload
Knowledge Management is a solution to the combat against information overload. According to Ted Tjaden (2007), there are technical and human solutions. Technical side assumes that if new technology is responsible for causing information overload it can also solve the problem of information overload. [14]
Key Competencies for Personal, Social, and Economic Well-Being
OECD has identified three key competencies that are essential for the personal and social development of people in modern societies. The three categories of key competencies are interacting in socially heterogeneous groups, acting autonomously, and using tools interactively. The first category is particularly relevant in multicultural societies. It is important for persons to be able to relate well to others, and to manage conflicts; learn how to join and function in groups of diverse backrounds. [20]
The second category, acting autonomously, is about individuals empowering to manage their lives in meaningful ways, controlling their living and working conditions. This is achieved through for example forming and conducting life plans and personal projects, and by defending and asserting one's rights, interests, limits, and needs. [20]
The ability to "use tools interactively" is the third category. It is in the core of masterig socio-cultural tools such as language, information, and knowledge, as well as physical tools such as computers. Though plain usage of the tool is not enough, the person needs to be familiar with the tool and to understand how tools effect to the way one can interact with the world and how the tool is used to accomplish broader goals. [20]
These key competencies can be adopted to the mobilisation of knowledge, cognitive and practical skills, and social and behavioural components. They shed light on how investments in human capital can bring benefits to both individuals and societies. [20]
Advices
Today’s advice from time-management specialists, to keep our e-mail software off, except for twice-a-day checks, replicates the cadence of twice-a-day postal deliveries in Mencken’s time. Mencken’s 100,000 letters serve as inspiration: we can handle more e-mail than we think we can, but should do so by attending to it only infrequently, at times of our own choosing. [2]
1. Decide what’s important. The first step is to take a step back. Get away from the computer, go outside to some place where you can sit down and think, and take a pen and pad and make a simple list: name the 4-5 things that are most important to you. This includes work and personal life, and all the things you do (including things online) and the things you’ve always wanted to do. This might be family, it might be aspects of your career, it might be dreams and goals, it might be hobbies or passions. It could be anything. But identify the most important things in your life, and begin to make those a priority. I would guess that most of the things you do online won’t make the list.[6]
2. Map out your day. Much of the problem is that we go online and just submerge ourselves in the information stream. And while some have argued that that’s not such a bad thing, the problem, again, is that we allow the information and those who are vying for our attention to dictate how we spend our most precious commodity: our time. I suggest that you, and not others, decide how you want to spend your time. Again, focus on what’s important to you, decide the three things you really want to accomplish today, and plan your day so that those things happen. You can include, in your time map of your day, things like checking email or reading feeds or chatting (see below), if those are important to you or your job, but the key is to make a conscious plan to do so and carry it out.[6]
3. Work less. Again, I submit that we get away from the mindset that we need to do more, more, more, and decide that we want to focus on the few things that are important to us. In order to do that, we have to eliminate things that are unimportant to make room for the important. And leaving some space around the things in our life (don’t schedule every minute) leaves us with a little breathing room and a little sanity. While I’m not saying you can achieve a four-hour work week, I do think you can achieve a 40-hour work week, and probably much less. I’ve been slowly reducing the hours I work, so that I now put in about 24 hours a week, and I’m planning on cutting that to 16. The key is to decide what is important, and focus on those things.[6]
4. Take control. Get into the mindset that you are the master of your information. It’s really about the mindset, because I think we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that when there are emails in our inbox, we HAVE to read them, and when there are RSS feeds in our reader, we have to read them, and when people are IMing us, we have to respond. We don’t. If there are emails or feeds in your inbox, that’s not your problem. Technology should serve us, not the other way around. We should not be at the beck and call of technology. Learn to realize that, and see that email and the other info technology are tools at our disposal, and that we should use them when we need them, and not be slaves to them.[6]
5. Shut down email. Again, email is a tool that you should use when you need it. You should not be a servant to it. As such, I suggest that you shut down your email when you don’t need it. Only go to your email when you want to use it, and don’t worry about responding to the messages in it right away, or even ever. If you want to respond to some of the urgent messages, feel free to do so, but again, you should pick and choose what you want to do. Don’t feel the need to respond to every message, or even read them. I would clear out my inbox every day or two, just by archiving or deleting those messages I don’t need to read or respond to, and dealing with the others at a time that I determine.[6]
6. Allow feeds to overload. Just because you’re subscribed to an RSS feed doesn’t mean that you should be compelled to read it. As such, you should not need to clean out your feed inbox every day. You decide when you want to read feeds, how many, how long. If you want to skip over a dozen or even hundreds of feeds and just read a couple, that’s your choice. Mark the rest as “read” or just ignore the unread count.[6]
7. Set up a chat zone. I rarely if ever use IM or any other kind of chat, but for those of you who need to be connected at least some of the time, you should have a set period each day when you connect to IM. Put it in your time map for the day, and let your contacts know that’s when you’ll be available. Don’t connect to chat at other times of the day, unless you really need to for a specific task.[6]
8. Disconnect once a day. In your time map, have a certain period where you’re disconnected. It’ll take some getting used to, but after awhile, you’ll probably look forward to your disconnected periods. You’ll likely get more work done, or feel more relaxed. Morning times are good for this.[6]
9. Take mini-breaks. Even when you’re connected, you shouldn’t do it for hours at a time. Every 45 minutes or so, get up, walk away from your computer, stretch your legs, take a walk around your home or office. Or better yet, get outside, get some fresh air, and get a little perspective. It’s important.[6]
10. Block distractions. When you’re connected but need to work, use a utility like Page Addict to track your time on different sites and block the distractions. This will allow you to do the work you need but not be tempted to check email or your feeds or your forums or what have you.[6]
11. Learn to focus. While short attention spans and the ability to multi-task might be a feature, and not a bug, of the newer generation of web workers, there’s still value in being able to focus on one task for long enough to complete it or at least make a lot of progress on it. It’s actually a skill that can be improved with practice. To learn to focus, turn off all programs and close all tabs except what’s needed to complete the task at hand. Set a timer for 10 or 20 minutes, and try to focus on getting the task done. When you feel yourself being pulled away, stop and pull yourself back. This ability to focus can make you a lot more productive.[6]
12. Drop out of forums. I think there are a lot of use to forums, especially in helping you achieve a goal. But if you find yourself needing to go see what the latest messages are, and spending too much time there, it’s probably not as productive as it should be. Learn how to drop out when you don’t really need a forum, and forget about it.[6]
13. Eliminate the news. Another huge source of information overload is news channels and sites. But what I’ve come to realize is that the news is all the same, but just packaged a little differently every time so we continue to consume it every day. Politics, human interest, international events, sports, entertainment … it’s the same every year, every month, every day. And it doesn’t add much to our lives — in fact, it distracts from what’s important. The important news will find you, trust me. Let the rest go.[6]
14. Read only 5 posts a day. If you set a certain time of day to read your RSS feeds, instead of skimming through all the posts, just put them in headline mode. Then, each day, choose only 5 posts to open in new tabs and read fully. Sure, you’ll be missing out on some other good stuff, but who cares? There is way more information out there that is of interest than you can possibly consume each day. Learn to let go. Just focus on a 5 posts, and really enjoy them. Then move on.[6]
15. Respond to only 5 emails a day. You can take a similar approach to email. Instead of trying to respond to the flood of emails coming in, just choose 5 every day and put them in a “respond” folder. Skim through the rest, and then respond to just those 5 emails every day. Life will go on, trust me.[6]
16. Write 5-sentence emails. Five sentences is a good limit. It forces you to be concise and to the point, and limits the time you spend responding to emails.[6]
17. Do less. Track the things you do in a day. Every time you do something, whether it’s a work-related task or responding to an email or reading something or commenting on a blog or whatever, write it down. It’s probably going to be a long list. Now see how many you can eliminate. Do the same thing to your to-do list: eliminate the non-essential tasks. Do less, not more, but focus on what’s important.[6]
18. Have a web-free day. Set one day a week where you don’t go on the Internet at all. That’s right. No email, no feeds, no blogs, no nothin’. A radical idea, to be sure, but one that will greatly increase your sanity and allow you to do what’s really important in your life.[6]
19. Work disconnected. An alternate strategy to having a disconnected period each day, see Tip 8, is to disconnect each time you need to work on an essential task. Pull the information you need off the web, disconnect, do the task, and the reconnect if you want. But working in a disconnected mode will help you concentrate and take control of your time.[6]
20. Tell people your boundaries. This is an important tip, because one of the things that makes us a slave to technology is the expectations by others that we will be connected, that we will communicate, that we will respond quickly. Well, that might be true, but it doesn’t have to be. Who says that we need to respond to emails right away? Who says that we need to be connected all the time? Well, maybe your boss does. But other than that, you should learn to take control of your time and your life, and set the expectations of others by telling them, up front, that you cannot be available all the time, and that you might not respond to email right away. Explain to them that you have a full schedule, and that you have set a new policy of being disconnected most of the time in order to get your work done. People might not always like this, but they’ll get used to it.[6]
21. Ask yourself why. When you feel the need to connect, to respond, to check messages, to consume more information, stop for one second and ask yourself why. Why do you feel that need? If there’s a good answer, then by all means, do it. But if you don’t know the answer, it’s probably best that you re-examine your priorities and decide whether this is really how you want to spend your day. [6]
Examples from Shirky Clay at Web 2.0 NY of Information Overload
An example from Shirky Clay at Web 2.0 Expo NY about privacy matters and controlling the information in facebook context. If you would like to change your relationship status from "engaged" to "single" you will experience difficulties. By just changing the status will cause everyone in your friends list to see the message from the status change, even the ones you do not consider as close friends. So you have to read through the privacy statements, click on necessary checkboxes and then change your status, but result is that still too many people receive this information. So handling your privacy in social portals context is also a way of filtering information to others. Also before this kind of social software came we did not have a possibility of letting so many people know of something that easily therefore we need new filters for privacy also. [4]
Another example- a case about a university student, who formed a study group online in facebook. Everything was working fine until the author of the study group was sewed by all 140 students and the university. Why, because they considered it cheating due to the fact the normally you have ~10 people in study groups where everyone has to do something and not just observe, because otherwise you will be dismissed from the study group. But in a community of 140 students there can be many people who just want to see the answers to coming test and do no work at all. So the problem was that we should have had filters so that information could not be accessed by everyone or the information should have been filtered from the source (university) but as we know we do not have solutions for these problems at this point. [4]
He states that in conclusion, we need to design new filters, not adjust old ones but totally knew ones that apply to the current environments. And when you suddenly think that you have too much information you should ask a question what filter just stopped working and only then we might get closer to a solution. [4]
