How to dig out from the information avalanche

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Don’t expect Shaun Osher, the CEO of Core Group Marketing in New York, to answer your e-mail right away.

He has stopped responding to e-mails every minute and only checks his e-mail account twice a day. He also started turning off his BlackBerry during meetings.

This tactic has made him so much more productive that earlier this year he held a meeting with his staff of 50 and “strongly suggested” that they to stop relying so heavily on e-mail and actually start calling clients on the phone. And, he requested his employees put cell phones and PDAs on silent mode during meetings, as well as curtail the common practice of cc-ing everybody when sending out an e-mail.

"There was so much redundancy, so much unnecessary work," he explains. "One person could handle an issue that should take two minutes, but when an e-mail goes out and five people get cc-ed, then everybody responds to it and there’s a snowball effect."

It’s not that Osher has anything against technology. In fact, he loves it.

The problem is, last year he realized he was inundated with so many e-mails and so much information in general that he began to experience data overload.

"In the beginning, e-mail and all this data was a great phenomenon, revolutionizing what we do. But the pendulum has swung way too much to the other side," he maintains. "We’re less productive."

Osher isn’t the only one out there under a data avalanche. Thanks to technological innovations, you can be talking to a customer on your cell phone, answering a LinkedIn invitation on your laptop, and responding to e-mail on your PDA all at the same time.

And during tough economic times, who wants to miss any information when your job could be on the line if you indulge in the luxury of being offline ?

Turns out, seven out of 10 office workers in the United States feel overwhelmed by information in the workplace, and more than two in five say they are headed for a data “breaking point,” according to a recently released Workplace Productivity Survey, commissioned by LexisNexis — a provider of business information solutions.

Here’s a breakdown of the findings:

• 62 percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need; 68 percent wish they could spend less time organizing information and more time using the information that comes their way.
• Workers admit that not being able to lay their hands on the right information at the right time impedes their ability to work efficiently; 85 percent agree that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a huge time-waster.
• More than 40 percent of the survey participants indicate an inability to handle future increases in information flow.
• While an average workday for white-collar workers is 8.89 hours, the survey finds that on average, 7.89 working hours are used conducting research, attending meetings, and searching for previously created documents.
• White-collar professionals spend an average of 2.3 hours daily conducting online research, with one in 10 spending four hours or more on an average day.

Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets, says there are a host of reasons we’re all on the information brink: "exponential growth of the size of the information 'haystack,' the ubiquity and immediacy of digital communications, and the fact that professionals are not being provided with sufficient tools and training to help them keep pace with the growing information burden."

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