How to dig out from the information avalancheMajority of wor...

How to dig out from the information avalanche

Majority of workers feel overwhelmed by deluge of data, survey finds

By Eve Tahmincioglu

updated 8:18 p.m. ET March 16, 2008

Don’t expect Shaun Osher, the CEO of Core Group

Marketing in New York, to answer your e-mail right away.

He has stopped responding to e-mails every minute and

only checks his e-mail account twice a day. He also started

5 turning off his BlackBerry during meetings.

This tactic has made him so much more productive

that earlier this year he held a meeting with his staff of 50

and “strongly suggested” that they stop relying so heavily

on e-mail and actually start calling clients on the phone.

10 And, he requested his employees put cell phones and

PDAs on silent mode during meetings, as well as curtail

the common practice of cc-ing everybody when sending

out an e-mail. “There was so much redundancy, so much

unnecessary work,” he explains. “One person could handle

15 an issue that should take two minutes, but when an email

goes out and five people get cc-ed, then everybody

responds to it and there’s a snowball effect.”

It’s not that Osher has anything against technology. In

fact, he loves it. The problem is, last year he realized he

20 was inundated with so many e-mails and so much

information in general that he began to experience data

overload. “In the beginning, e-mail and all this data was a

great phenomenon, revolutionizing what we do. But the

pendulum has swung way too much to the other side,” he

25 maintains. “We’re less productive.”

Osher isn’t the only one out there under a data

avalanche. Thanks to technological innovations, you can

be talking to a customer on your cell phone, answering a

LinkedIn invitation on your laptop, and responding to email

30 on your PDA all at the same time. Besides, during

tough economic times, who will want to miss any

information when your job could be on the line if you indulge

in the luxury of being offline? Turns out, seven out of 10

office workers in the United States feel overwhelmed by

35 information in the workplace, and more than two in five

say they are headed for a data “breaking point,” according

to a recently released Workplace Productivity Survey.

Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets,

says there are a host of reasons we’re all on the information

40 brink: “exponential growth of the size of the information

‘haystack,’ the immensity and immediacy of digital

communications, and the fact that professionals are not

being provided with sufficient tools and training to help

them keep pace with the growing information burden.”

45 ___ Ellen Kossek, a professor from Michigan State, believes

we are less productive in this age of 24-7 technology, and

our multitasking mentality has spawned a “not-mentallypresent”

society. “We’re becoming an attention-deficit

disorder society switching back and forth like crazy,”

50 Kossek says. “We’re connected all the time. We’re

working on planes, in coffee shops, working on the

weekends. Work is very seductive, but yet we’re actually

less effective.”

The key to getting your head above the data flood,

55 according to workplace experts, is managing and reducing

the information you’re bombarded with.

© 2008 MSNBC Interactive - (slightly adapted)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23636252/

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