I attended the inaugural IORG conference in New York City a couple of weeks ago.

IORG – the Information Overload Research Group was founded earlier this year by a group of industry experts and research analysts to address the growing concern of continued information overload, the negative impact on worker productivity and the resulting “burn-out” of today’s knowledge workers.

I have covered this important issue in previous blog posts and it is refreshing to see that now some of the world’s leading companies and universities are dedicating resources to study the effects of information overload.

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This extensive email checklist posted by Seth Godin encourages you to think before you hit send. It is a very timely follow-up to our recent whitepaper: “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs.”

My personal favorite, number 36:

“If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?”

Technorati Tags: email checklist, seth godin, email best practices, email overload

Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that in many cases, business and otherwise, 80% of the effects come only from 20% of causes. Email is no exception – however, the ratio is far more extreme.

Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

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Bob Spurzem on the Ferris blog sees the same exponential pattern that Gordon Moore predicted for electronic circuits to apply to the growth of email.

“Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially.

Finally, consider mailbox size. A 10MB mailbox was once the norm and was replaced with 100-200MB mailboxes in recent years. Today users expect multigigabyte mailboxes, made famous by Google’s Gmail.”

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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.”

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The Wall Street Journal posted yet another article on the topic of email overload titled “Email’s Friendly Fire”, last week. Once again, it takes up the issue of unwanted messages clogging people’s inboxes (see also my previous posts about Occupational Spam).

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