Managing information overload
Source: Harvard Business IdeaCast 159
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A lot of emails get into our inbox, work- or personal-, every day. This huge amount of information can affect different aspects of our lives: productivity, creativity and in some cases it can even slow down the process of making a decision.
Investigations have found that 1/3 of the emails that a person gets, are actually not necessary. There is also evidence that shows that every sent email, generates two emails in response.
All this messages are the causes of email bankruptcy and online silence. Email bankruptcy refers to the decision made by an email user to close his or her account because of all the unnecessary data that he or she gets every day. Online silence is the situation in which, after some messages, the sender of an email does not know what happened to his or her original petition.
With all those emails going and coming, it is easy to feel overwhelmed so, what can we do to avoid all of these negative effects?
In the professional field, some organizations try to establish some kind of norms in order to make use of the email service. Some companies have a policy declaring that after 10pm, the email service is going to be deactivated so everyone can take a rest of all this continuos flow of information.
Out of the office, we can use tech tools, such as social networks, to filter information and do the job for us. Although this can be of great help, there are two disadvantages: you need to share personal information (you may not feel comfortable doing this) and you will get only the information that adjusts to the “profile” that you are sharing (and this means that you may be missing some interesting stuff that does not adjust to your “profile”).
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It would not be fair to say that I am a responsible user of information, because I know that I have sent out some emails that were not really necessary. Nevertheless, I always try to make my point:
- I do choose a descriptive subject or title for my message
- I also try to stick to KISS (Keep It Short and Simple)
- I state my petition in a clear way
- I try to avoid the “FYI” statement because of its effect (a simple “FYI” does not tell you something about the content of the message so you may think “I will check it out later” and then you just forget about it)
At work, I get an average of 20 - 30 emails per day and this is already hard to manage (I don’t want to think about all the work that would represent manage an inbox that gets 50, 100 or 200 emails per day, and I know there are persons who get this amount of messages). What I do in order to manage this amount of info and, what is even more important, keep a track on the important items is to separate messages using folders and also bookmarking the items that requires special attention (so I will not forget them).
Are you a responsible user of information?
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oc
