Did you know that by 2012, the typical knowledge worker will receive hundreds of messages each day via e-mail, IM, text, and social networks?  And that knowledge workers today lose 25% of the work day due to Information Overload?

I have written about information overload and the research conducted by its namesake group on this blog a number of times. Now IORG is bringing renewed attention to this problem by declaring August 12 “Information Overload Awareness Day” and holding a half-day online event, presenting findings of their research and options to lessen the impact.

The keynote is being presented by Nathan Zeldes, the former “Information Overload Czar” at Intel and current President of the IORG.

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Twitter has been making headlines for weeks, fueled by a celebrity powered media frenzy. With Ashton Kutcher beating CNN to 1 million Twitter followers last Friday and now even Oprah Winfrey joining in – Twitter is surely bracing for the Oprah effect.

So is Twitter over-hyped or the future of electronic communication?

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Only a few months following the reply-to-all tidal wave bringing down the email infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department experienced a massive self-inflicted assault on their mail servers last week as well.

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Many people dread the idea of disconnecting from email while taking time off, for fear of missing critical information or emergencies that need their attention back at the office.

I met Jared Goralnick, an efficiency and productivity consultant, at the inaugural IORG conference last summer in NY, and he told me about a solution he had been working on, called AwayFind.

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Email is undoubtedly the most heavily used electronic communication medium today. We use email to communicate in business, to stay in touch with friends and family, get shipment notifications, bill reminders, statements from the utility or cable company and on and on…

This convenience comes at a price.  Not only do our our inboxes become increasingly cluttered, but the more often we share our primary address on the Internet the greater the chance of getting onto spammers distribution lists as well.

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Seth Godin asked this timely question on his blog:

“When you’re done with your email queue, are you done?
Do you spend your day responding and reacting to incoming [messages] all day… until the list is empty? … and then you’re done.“

This is a great follow-up to the discussion at IORG a few weeks ago.

• About 12% of the average worker’s time is spent thinking or reflecting, while 28% of time is consumed by disruptions  from things that aren’t urgent  or important,  like unnecessary email messages and the time it takes to get back on track. (Jonathan Spira, Basex)
• Employees at Intel spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email. (Nathan Zeldes, Intel)

New social media with its constant chatter of invites, pings and pokes seems to exacerbate the problem.

Is most of your day consumed by simply processing information, rather than initiating, reaching out, inventing and designing?

Technorati Tags: email productivity, information overload