A Happy New Year to all.

According to Basex, a NY-based research firm led by Jonathan Spira, information overload is the “Problem of the Year” for 2008.

Basex released a study at the end of last month, claiming that information and collaboration overload consumes almost 30% of a knowledge worker’s workday, which may cost the U.S. economy as much as $588 billion a year.

“As much as e-mail, instant messages, blogs and their brethren technologies have helped knowledge workers better collaborate, interruptions and duplications derived from these forms of digital communication and content are overwhelming workers to the point of distraction.”

The constant and increasing pressure applied from an always-on workplace is starting to reduce worker productivity and outweigh the benefits of these collaborative technologies. This is mainly caused by:

1. The constant interruption and perceived need to instantly respond to email, text messaging and IM, and
2. The increasing difficulty and time spent to retrieve information that is scattered across the different collaboration platforms.

While the study doesn’t provide any “Silver Bullets” to solve this problem, it offers a few tips for user education:

• Choose the proper communication medium based on urgency and amount of information that needs to be conveyed.
• Don’t pepper your co-workers on multiple channels simultaneously.
• Be specific in your communication (use descriptive subject lines; read your emails before sending, etc).

Technorati Tags: email overload, email costs

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