Information Overload Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008 146
Wired is reporting that information overload is being predicted by some analysts as the problem of the year for 2008. "'It's too much information. It's too many interruptions. It's too much lost time,' Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. 'It's always too much of a good thing.' Information overload isn't exactly new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available, he said, also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine."
you should welcome it. (Score:5, Funny)
Correction: Information Overlord Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008.
Obligatory welcome (Score:1)
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(2 mod-points if you can say that fast 3 times in a row.)
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Correction to the correction: Information Overlord Overload Predicted Problem of the Year for 2008.
I've been saying for years that we need to stop spawning more overlords, but would you people listen? Of course not.
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Using a search engine is too hard? (Score:3, Insightful)
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And back to the original topic of email... If you had hundreds or even thousands of emails back and forth between the same people over again with the same subject or similar subjects over the course of a year, it makes it hard to search for one in particular since searching by subject or
... if you know the exact wording (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, a search for the program name... nope. He must have thought it's obvious what project I'm on. Let's detour through Bugzilla and look up the bug number. Some time later, ah-ha, I have the bug number. Search for that, nope. Repeat ad nauseam.
The problem is that even remembering something by a synonym, still throws simple search off. Completely. Now let's see, in how many ways can you say "bug". Well, there's "bug", but then there's "flaw", or "defect", or even "problem", etc. So did the boss say it's ok to ship with known "bug", "flaws", "defects", "problems", or what? Now have fun finding out which of the tens of hits for "bug" is really the one you're looking for. But maybe even that wasn't phrased like that at all. Maybe what he said is something like, "it's ok if the web service interface isn't ready in the pilot phase." Or a gazillion other wordings to the same effect.
Or maybe it was my favourite, some idiot took a screenshot of the log viewer and pasted it into Word as an image. Then you get an email with the actual info as a picture, and some text like "but I think that's low priority right now". Now search that.
Really, the problem is that we still index and search by words, but your memory is rarely text-file quality. You remember ideas, and (if needed) your brain interpolates the gaps.
E.g., you may think you photographically remember your wife in her blue dress on the balcony in your honeymoon, but really you don't store a pixel array like that. The actual pixel array never even leaves the eyes, there's edge detection and contrast enhancement that's built right into the retina itself, to save bandwidth on the optic nerve. Then before it even makes it past the short term buffer, that scene is pruned, tokenized, etc, and you only really got an internal representation of the scene instead of the actual image. That's already missing a lot of information, like, for a start, everything that's outside the focus of attention. (While focusing on the blonde with great tits at the wheel, you completely lose such information as the license plate or even the pink gorilla doing cartwheels across the road.) You have a SEP field built-in, so to speak.
Then over time details or links get lost, and your brain just does a best-guess filling in the gaps. So over time you might remember that the wife's dress was blue, although it was green. Or maybe she wasn't wearing a dress at all on that day, and was in a t-shirt and jeans. Etc.
That goes double for remembering text. You rarely remember the actual text, unless you do rote memorization. But I'd rather not do that with all emails. If you had to actually remember the exact text describing the scene above, even if you remember the general scene, how many ways are there to say that she was wearing jeans? "Pants" works too, for a start. The shirt gets even funnier, because you might just remember it as a "shirt" instead of "t-shirt", and from there there are even more synonyms. "Blouse" and "top" come to mind, for example.
And that's when word-based search will fail you.
What we'd need is some search that's indexed by ideas. But until computers start to really understand natural language, we're kinda screwed. And I mean, understand what it _means_, not just parse English.
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You forgot "feature"
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I was mostly just making a joke at Microsoft's expense there, but I completely agree with you. This is why after one really bad client I always make mine give me a complete spec in writing. It actually deters a lot of clients who I guess were counting on the ability to pull a fast one with me but the ones who are willing to sit down with me and work out exactly what they want before I start working are really the only ones I want. If their wishes change later on in the project, they can write addenda and we
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Good filtering there ;) (Score:2)
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This is a really old story (Score:5, Informative)
Why the Coming Data Flood Won't Drown the Internet:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=392492&cid=21737872 [slashdot.org]
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not necessarily information overload (Score:5, Insightful)
This problem isn't necessarily an overload of information. It's just a transformation. From the article:
These disoriented workers just found their new diversion. Workers are mostly effective, or not effective. Effective workers long ago folded the explosion of information into their daily work flow and are mostly more efficient because of it. Ineffective workers can now use and point to e-mail as their nemesis preventing them from being efficient and getting work done.
But, before the (alleged) explosion, ineffective workers had minesweeper and solitaire. Before that they had a water cooler and last night's shows to talk about. Before that it was real solitaire with real cards.
Yes, the information is overwhelming, but it's mostly easy to filter. I have found anecdotally that even with the exploding amount of information, that not only is it not overwhelming, it's more topical and current than ever possible in the past, and it's actually more easily searched than in the past. If any of you out there remember the old days of writing research papers, it was far more difficult to gather all the necessary research and organize when the only option was the local library, or if you were lucky and in college with a computing center, the other option was the time-share terminals in the computing building.
As for interruptions and avoiding them, it's easy enough to minimize e-mail interruptions -- establish and stick to an e-mail policy. If you don't want to be interrupted, don't allow people to interrupt you.
Evolution... (Score:4, Funny)
Now it's /.
Re:not necessarily information overload (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why I'd recommend against hiring employees that can't focus. Really, at any moment I may have to stop in the middle of PC repair {5 PCs on bench at current}, answer questions from anyone that calls/comes in, keep documentation current on our projects, handle any urgent incoming email/faxes/requests, and even a bit of sales if our sales force is out of the shop. It can get intense at times, but is FAR from anything I'd come even close to calling "disorienting".
If you've not a mind for the business you're in, then you're out of your mind for working in a field not suited to your abilities.
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Not necessarily true. Some professions will require a focus with no interruptions at all (such as someone else asking for help with an unrelated task or answering a phone). If you had a surgeon operating on you, the last thing you would want is the surgeon getting an interruption of some.
Let's look at the quote I indicated earlier:
Workers get disoriented every time they stop what they are doing to reply to an e-mail or answer a follow-up phone call because they didn't reply within minutes. Spira said workers can spend 10 to 20 times the length of the original interruption trying to get back on track.
Now, at NO point during surgery would hospital management expect a doctor to answer email or the phone. Au contraire, the hospitals ban cellular use in surgical areas as to avoid equipment interference. Likewise, it's hard to expect a doctor to have their office PC {the one receiving the email} in the surgical suite itself.
Might I be so bold as to encourage you to post another example that's more in-line with office work?
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I thought the example was perfectly reasonable and relevant. The point that was bein
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If you absolutely have to have an office example then how about my situation. I work for one of the largest insurance companies in North America as an application architect.
If you're talking USAA, I work with one of their lead web designers...
Between email, voice mail, phone calls (cell and desk varieties), IM and people just "stopping by to ask a question" my day is one long interruption, and I don't even have a CrackBerry(tm) yet.
The designer I know DOES have one of those Smackberries, and STILL gets her job done. Want to know her secret? Let's look at what you said next to set up my next point:
Is my problem that I can not focus? No. It's that with the never ending interruptions in the modern office it is virtually impossible to make any headway on the design for that 500 day project when you're only able to squeeze a few minutes of the day here and there.
Whoa. As neither you, she, nor I are at the top of our respective food chains, that means we have supervisors. Folks whose job is to {in theory} make sure that OURS is getting done.
Have you gone to them to make SURE you have the space you need for a project? Our f
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This. There's nothing quite like being really in the zone, 8 loops deep in a complex routine, when the phone rings, and some boob says "hey bro, not to interrupt, cuz I know you're busy today, but can I ask you a quick question?" Maybe it's important, maybe it's not, but it sure is frustrating.
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Of course, it doesn't take a whole lot of focus to build a PC.
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You mean like losing focus and post on some forum while work sits on their deask?(I believes 5 PCs at the moment)
You mean the PCs in varying states of diagnosis? The ones running diagnostics that won't run any faster if I watch the progress bar intently?
...and I can give a status for any of 'em while on the phone or otherwise engaged... My boss is well aware I read and post on Slashdot, but looks it as I do: learning opportunities galore.
Of course, it doesn't take a whole lot of focus to build a PC.
Guess you lost your focus; my OP said nothing about builds, which are presently so n00b-friendly a spastic monkey could slap one together. It said repair, which infers diagnosis
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Wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire 5 incompetent employees from geek squad on contract, outsource the technical question to India, and fire you?
In all seriousness, contract and outsourced labor would trump full time employees because they only get paid when there is work to be done. Of course they'll probaly won't be able to focus, but when someone wants a profit for the quarterly report at upper echelon of management, its easier for
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However, if a company cared about quality (and could afford it) they would have devoted your job into separate positions in which there was a full time sales person and a full time repair person. About 10 years ago, I worked for a small time PC repair shop with maybe 4 employees but I still didn't do sales and only did two computers at a time.
As indicated in my OP, we DO have a sales force... who many times are asked questions of a technical nature. I'm one of three people here that can answer those.
I'm full-time repair, yes, but enjoy helping with the weird stuff that comes up in our day. I *want* the business to grow!
When you force people to focus on multiple things at once, even if they can do it right it will lead to burnout fairly quickly.
15 years of doing this every day, at multiple locations, and no sign of burnout here! I'd suggest that the ones with burnout aren't the ones that LOVE working in this field. I'm glad I'm not one of 'em!
Interruptions do cause unexpected stress to a work environment and can really hamper things over long term.
Let me rephrase tha
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Conversely, working in R&D testing software takes a lot of focus. When we don't have enough support staff and the calls get fed through to me, I have to change my mindset to deal with very different legacy equipment, some dating back to the early 90s. I have to troubleshoot these systems over the phone with idiots that can't even read an error message straight, with th
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And yet another 'costs our economy' number. I wonder how they come up with those numbers.
Overload for the nonefficients.. (Score:2)
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Re:not necessarily information overload (Score:5, Interesting)
As a business owner or manager, one of the things you need to improve is employee effectiveness. I've managed individuals that are off-the-charts effective when uninterrupted, but easily get lost in the crush of emails. These are usually the people-pleasers. If I send them an email requesting A, B, and C, they'll deliver promptly and thoroughly. But if in the meantime they have received an email requesting D, E, and F from someone else, they run into problems because they can't deliver A through F promptly AND complete their normal workflow.
There are a couple ways of dealing with this. One is to establish priority controls on workflow. Another is to route all requests through their manager. A third is to establish an SLA that gives the employee a better guideline for when a response is expected.
In no way does this mean that the employee is an ineffective employee -- it just means that they are ineffective given their nature and the nature of the work presented to them.
My point, really, is that some good employees handle the "information overload" well, and some don't. The trick is to work with your staff's strengths and weaknesses to maximize their effectiveness. Yes, there are people who truly are generally ineffective -- but that's a hiring issue. Usually ineffective employees can be made effective through competent management.
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What you have indirectly acknowledged and TFA did not, is that different people have different inherent skills. Of course different skills will place and/or limit people within the business hierarchy. If someone is only very effective when dealing with three or less requests at a time, then they will forever have to be under close management. They cannot ever be project heads or work
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Competent...management? Fish...unicycle? I recognize both of these words, but in combination they puzzle me.
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"It's impossible to shut email off! You send a message to somebody, and they send it back saying "Thank you", and you say "OK, thanks for thanking me..."
Email is wonderful for some people, absolutely necessary for their job, and they can do their work better. I like to say that for people whose role is to be on top of things, electronic mail is great. But my role is to
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Still, putting procmail's sorting ability into more of the apps favored by casual end-users might be the next easy Internet fortune.
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As for interruptions and avoiding them, it's easy enough to minimize e-mail interruptions -- establish and stick to an e-mail policy. If you don't want to be interrupted, don't allow people to interrupt you.
I find the combo attacks the worst, the kind that either send me an email and tell me "Could you look at the case I just sent over?" or just try to steal me away "Can you come over for five minutes and look at this?" and usually if you're already in the "interrupted" state everyone else see it as their chance to jump at you too. While it wouldn't really work with support hours, I've found that you need some sort of pacing - work concentrated one hour, solve various tidbits one hour, work concentrated one h
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Email is a valid distraction. Some of the places I've worked had a real problem with email - their corporate, CYA, political buck-passing culture meant that they exchanged far more email than was really necessary. In some of my other firms, people talked face to face. Now, it seems, everyone wants a "paper trail" so they can blame someone else when things go wrong. Hence the flood of irrelevant, distracting, work-stopping email.
Typical problems:
Couple things.. (Score:1)
I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
God damn it! (Score:2, Funny)
Action Item #1 (Score:2, Funny)
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I have information underload (Score:2, Interesting)
Unintentionally, ... (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA: "also means more time wasted looking for the right information"
If looking for the 'right information' is considered 'waste of time', how do you think 'deciding which information is appropriate', i.e. actually thinking (no outside activity to be observed, mind that) is valued?
Much better to quickly produce a dupe of some blurb to add up to overload.
CC.
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New Headline (Score:5, Funny)
Wired Editor Attempts to Fill Whitespace
Fixed it for you.
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I know Jonathan Spira personally. I couldn't have nailed it better. Jonathan's a well-meaning attention whore who loves talking about himself as much as about his own interests.
The only thing he's better at is misunderstanding technology.
Not Really A Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I find that people have a tendency to overestimate the volume of work they can handle. That said, there's definitely something to the notion that you shouldn't bother someone unless you have to. If you find yourself frequently disrupting someone's work (or find yourself frequently disrupted) out of necessity, however, then you need to reassign responsibilities, put those responsibilities on the chopping block, and/or get help.
Information overload, man! (Score:4, Funny)
Spider: What causes it?
[points to various pieces of equipment throughout the room]
Spider: This causes it! This causes it! This causes it! Information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves. Technological fucking civilization. But we still have all this shit, because we can't live without it. Let me do my work.
Not to worry folks... (Score:2)
This will be more than offset by the time-saving switch to Linux (2008, year of Linux on the Desktop!). A much bigger issue will be the distraction of playing Duke Nukem Forever. And all this is assuming the tubes of the internets don't burst from the exaflood. Lastly, all this will only be a problem until June when the Roombas take over the earth and sweep us all into neat little piles.
I for one... (Score:2)
Search engine results that are another frickin search engine or consolidation site that may or may not even have what i was looking for. Here we go round in circles...
At least i instinctively avoid the ebay links that have whatever i searched for...even when they don't
Well that and news sites that link to a blog....hint hint
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Gotta love those.
"Click HERE for your NUMBER 1 source for blue screen 0x800ccc0e!"
"Click HERE for your NUMBER 1 source for exchange 2003 pop3 retrieval!"
"Click HERE for your NUMBER 1 source for fetchmail!"
Who knew you could find all that stuff in one place?
Mercifully those sorts of results seem to be on the decline...
This is nothing new under the sun (Score:2)
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"Don't learn to think for yourself or God will get you." Gee, people using a fictitious character in a way to prevent people from actually thinking about what they are saying.
It had NOTHING to do with organizing or storing data in an accurate way.
"
9 Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care.
10 The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth.
11 The words of the wise are like
Listen to wise men, and don't read? (Score:2)
"The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." -- Ecclesiastes 11 and 12.
I doubt that anyone who reads Slashdot wants to read only "collected sayings", and be poor because he or she has lost his job.
Octopussy (Score:2)
Popfile
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Tools like this will help get rid of corporate spam[1] as well as the normal stuff. They'll eventually evolve into general purpose artificially intelligent personal assistants which will act as a filter on almost all communication.
[1] Crap from various management who spam the world with trivia about how they are feeling.
This problem is already solved. (Score:2)
Slashvertisement? (Score:3)
Quote from the Basex web site [basex.com]:
"Basex reaches the key decision makers in the Collaborative Business Knowledge space."
I know that many people don't speak Corporate Robot Language, so I will translate: "We are really, really bored with our jobs. We don't like technical things, or have any respect for technically knowledgeable people. However, to make ourselves seem more important, we adopt technical-sounding expressions, and pretend that they are meaningful."
I'm guessing that the New York Times got paid for that article, and so did someone at Slashdot.
I would love to see the "Collaborative Business Knowledge Space". I'm guessing it is about one centimeter square and is guarded by one old cockroach.
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But, since we have already spilled so many pixels over how much of the problem is the tools and how much is the resistance of the workers to interruptions, does anyone have recommendations for better tools? or at least tools that give you options for working smarter?
Not using the "alert" feature on gmail, for instance, leaves a chunk of my bandwidth in tact.
How to deal with information overload (Score:2, Funny)
1) Don't give your manager more information than you have to. "Good morning" should be sufficient for the day. He's got a lot on his plate, and doesn't need to know that you've had no work to do for the past month.
2) Don't tell anyone where you're going when you go for a meeting, or whom it's with. That information could be just one bit too much. In fact, don't force the admin staff to check if there's a room available. Go down the pub for the meetin
Infoglut is not new (Score:2)
Only one sane solution... (Score:1)
RSS (Score:2)
Scott Adams Had Few Things to Say... (Score:2)
"Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society's intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all."
I don't think that information overload will be our biggest problem, it will be the springboard to something greater. Not necessarily to the same conclusion that that Scott does, but the ability to process it all. We can create information successfully, we just haven't mastered the ability to search through it all. A problem such as too much information is the impetuous behind making sense of it all.
So basically (Score:2, Funny)
A famous quote is in order. (Score:2)
Herbert Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon [wikipedia.org]
Messed up priorities (Score:2)
I know this is Wired and one can't expect them to focus on the real problems, but I find it completely absurd to predict "Information Overload" as 2008's biggest problem.
Data Overload Not Information Overload (Score:2)
Maybe it's just a semantic difference, but there can never be too much information. Information is useful, it can be easily sorted and digested both mentally and algorithmically. The problem I foresee (and I think it's been here for quite some time) is that there's just far too much data on the internet with almost no value as information.
Duplication, an age old engineering problem, rears its ugly head once again. The massive amount of duplication caused by sites like digg and youtube dramatically decr
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yup
cuz generally folks spend their time asking questions instead of trying to answer them
if you spend any time trying to answer questions you will get an interesting lesson: when you come into possession of some valuable information you need to file that information and index it in such a manner as you and others are highly likely to be able to find it again.
this isn't easy
poop deluge (Score:1)
Learn how to set up categories and context filters to make your e-mail work for you instead of against you.
Have "robots" triage the messages.
Once the robots filter out all the static it is easy to concentrate on the fifteen or so messages that actually make sense.
This was news?
Google search result overload (Score:2)
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Welcome to Time Management for Sysadmins (Score:4, Interesting)
Turn it off. There is an appropriate time to be reading your e-mail, responding to instant messages, and texting your boss on your blackberry. And there is an appropriate time for work. Set those times in your schedule quite strictly. During that your work time, your e-mail is not open. Your blackberry is off. MSN is closed. You can probably expect to get three to four hours of this kind of time per day. Unless something is on fire, nothing is to interrupt you, and you can focus on what you're doing and be astoundingly effective and productive.
Once you're done, it's back to e-mail and MSN and constant interruptions. Or "team building" at the water cooler. Whatever.
chicken nuggets in 30s or less (Score:4, Funny)
That's the present state of corporate email and IM culture: fast is good. Fast is actually crap, unless you are careful where you eat, but it will take another decade or so for backlash to recruit the unwashed. The average email response received in under 15 minutes is deep fried in hydrogenated soybean oil to a crispy golden colour. Yum, yum. Eat up and regurg, if you wish to see Santa arrive with your xmas bonus arrive in your neck of the cubical farm.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
-- George Bernard Shaw
This is the problem (Score:2)
This is the major reason for the problem. People who send these emails, text messages, and so forth, expect instantaneous response. It's gotten very bad.
I recently had to deal with an issue at a customer's site. I was asked numerous times when the expert at my company would have an answer. Hell, I was asked every 30 minutes. This was a problem that was beyond my expertise and required an expert
These are a few of my favorite things... (Score:2, Interesting)
* Emails tagged as 'important' from corporate - that are not.
* Emails from corporate that contain a Word file that I have to open only to find a single sentence that could have been cut and pasted into the email instead.
* Corporate managers that think instant messages are a great idea.
* Having to fill out multiple time sheets, one for my paycheck and at least one for project management.
* Corp websites that have too much info and are very poorly organized.
* Microsoft Pro
Information Overload. Wrong direction. (Score:2)
Nope, InfoOverload (IO) not problem .... (Score:2)
I am +55yo. I need each work/friend/family email I get. I need my email-list and S&T/R&D/.EDU/. news
Information-Overload Overhype (Score:2)
Sure, why not? I have been hearing how people were going to be overloaded by information every year for the past 25 years. Seems a lot like predictions of the imminent demise of the Internet. Or how if you watched a puppy growing for the first month of its life, you would conclude that it will be 400 feet tall in six years. Funny how these things never seem to come to fruition. Perhaps there is some kind of co
False link! (Score:2, Informative)
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After the flaming replies, the poster got a +5 Informative for doing EXACLY what I'm doing here.
I was actually sorry that I'd moderated the comment badly. Heh.
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Agreed, that would be neat, but my personal policy is that if the link goes to tinyurl or snipurl, then I'm just going to pass. No need to get goatse'd.
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I guess this "dont mod up the "mod down minicity" posts" post should also be not modded up (If I'm missing the point I'll take +5 insightful
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