Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Dealing with Information Overload

Is there such a thing as having too much intranet content? Intranets have been touted as a cost-effective content management solution for most companies — regardless of size and industry — because of their flexibility and scalability. They can be developed and molded to solve almost any organizational problem with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to purchasing multiple third-party software suites.

But have we crossed the line from productivity to inefficiency by the sheer amount of information that we put into our intranets? And I'm not even talking about the extraneous content (content that should never make it onto the intranet to begin with) I'm talking about actual usable content. In an attempt to provide as much information to our users, in as wide a range of topics as possible, have we actually done everyone a disservice by putting in more content than any one person can absorb? But herein lies the point: no one is meant to.

It's time we all take a different approach; to look at this "problem" from another angle. Rather than worrying about the amount of intranet content placed into an intranet, we should be questioning the manner in which we handle this content in our daily lives. After all, when dealing with a flood, you don't curse the water, you figure out a way to keep it from swallowing you whole.

Don't Let Information Direct You

My morning information consumption ritual usually consists of sifting through both current events and industry news — and there's a lot of it. I spend no more than five seconds on any one article, reading the headline and taking a cursory glance at the lead-in. If the article doesn't interest me within that short window of opportunity, the key gets a little workout.

However, a few times I found myself staring at — or more accurately, staring through — my monitor as though it were a fish tank, tapping away at the without even reading the title. In short, I "zoned out." Does all of this extraneous content take focus away from primary information that has direct relevance to the here and now?

In between the myriad of newsletters, RSS feeds, personal and professional e-mails, and recently, the real-time newsflashes of the Tour de France bicycle race that I've convinced myself is an integral part of my productive work day, I have hundreds of pieces of information to digest every morning. Some are discarded without thought while others are filed away to be read and dealt with at a later time. But I know full well that I'll never get to it because tomorrow morning there will be newer pieces of information to take its place. Sometimes, by the end of the day, it feels as though I've been in constant motion but have accomplished little.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where more is better. Intranet owners pack every bit of information onto their CMS if it has even a whisper of relevance. And for the users' part, they squirrel away as much content as they can even though they know that it's never going to be read or put to use. So why do we do this? We do it out of fear. It's not a fear like the one invoked by the Bogeyman when we were children; it's the fear of missing out on something and being out of the loop. And this is the true problem; it's us, not the content.

Dr. Edward M. Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey — professors of psychiatry at Harvard who have studied the effects of technology on our attention spans and ability to focus on key tasks — coined the term pseudo-attention deficit disorder (ADD). While sufferers of this condition don't actually have clinical ADD, they do experience a shortened attention span. They're often unable to focus on primary tasks without compulsively checking their e-mail, v-mail, and surfing for secondary bits of information. Dr. Ratey equates the feeling of being constantly connected to technology and information to the sensation of getting a narcotics hit, or what he calls getting a "dopamine squirt."

Rampant multitasking and a deluge of available information have produced a counterproductive culture and created a paradox: The more we try to do, the less we get done; and the more inundated we are with information, the less time we spend absorbing it.



http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200507/ij_07_18_05a.html