Cloud company salesforce.com has found that most sent emails are counterproductive. 70% of workers were sent emails that were irrelevant or of no interest. 38% said they suffered from information overload at work.
This actually doesn’t surprise me. Luckily, I don’t have many friends who send the anonymous chain email that says ‘forward along or you’ll have bad luck for the week’. I do think though that our generation is reaching a place of information overload.
Consider what our parents saw when driving through town as a kid, a billboard of a local establishment, a local dj on the radio, a basic streetlight. Now think about us, billboards that digitally change from one advertisement to the next in mere seconds, XM radio that cuts out commercials, a streetlight that takes a picture of traffic violators, and of course, something that always is next to me in the car, a cell phone.
The amount of technology that accumulates in our lives everyday is amazing. Now we have access to just about anything and everything on the internet. We can prepare a class presentation from a phone. We can video chat with someone on the other side of the world. At what point though, does it become too much? Where does the information stop?
Back to the email topic, I receive so many emails a day, it’s tough to keep track - emails about local events this week in Baton Rouge, easy-to-make recipes, shopping sales, business news and seminar alerts all before 10:30am. I’ve come to the realization that many of them have to be overlooked in order to actually start my day. I’m not sure I’d have it any other way though. Even though I might not open everything that appears in my inbox, I like knowing that I can if I want to. Maybe there is no such thing as too much or maybe we have to become our own filters of infromation?
I completely agree Katherine. In my opinion there is an information overload, and while in our personal lives we can be our own filters, I believe that in our professional lives there may be a need to streamline the volume of information. With IT continuing to enhance the flow of information, I believe that we have reached a point that IT needs to start understanding the overwhelming amount of information employees sift through and how to best streamline it and make it more consumable. We can already see examples of this with google's "chat" like email feature which displays emails like running conversations. I believe that by focusing on this type of technology it would allow employees to comprehend and organize more of the information passed to them throughout the day and thus make them more efficient.
ReplyDelete