Overload -- Article Review Hemp,

¶ … OVERLOAD -- ARTICLE REVIEW

Hemp, P. "Information Overload: New Research and Novel Techniques

offer a Lifeline to You and Your Organization." Harvard Business Review, Sept/2009: 83-89.

Brief Summary

According to the author, one of the downsides to the digital revolution and the ubiquity of Internet and Intranet instant communications connectivity is that it has evolved into a communications systems that has begun to frustrate it own purpose. Specifically, computer-based communications applications, (principally, email), were originally conceived as mechanisms to facilitate the efficiency of modern business by expediting communications. Instead, they have become a serious drain on precious resources such as time and employee attention to primary tasks.

The author suggests that email and other communications-based applications (including social networking sites, texting, and twittering) now typically require too much time necessary for managing communications information. Constant emails absorb too great an amount of working time to be ignored by organizations. Moreover, the amount of time lost to managing communications information also includes additional time by virtue of the time ordinarily required to re-establish focus on whatever tasks are interrupted by the need to check or respond to email.

The author describes several approaches to resolving the problem. Some of them relay on formal "all-or-none" rules; others rely more on technological tools to help manage communications automatically. Some of the authors advice seems unlikely to be helpful; the rest is (or should be) somewhat obvious to most people. In some respects, much of the author's advice may relate more to errors of perception and perspective than to problems that actually require "solutions."

Management/Communication Issues and Problems

The principal source of the problem defined by Hemp is that life of the average working person has become heavily inundated with digital information and multimedia interpersonal communications. The estimates cited referred to a $1 trillion national cost in terms of the amount of work time lost to email exchanges and the additional time employees typically waste in refocusing on interrupted tasks.

According to the author, some observers have characterized the dynamics of the behavioural manifestation of communications information overload as having similarities to bona fide cognitive disorders such as attention deficit disorder (ADD). Others have coined new descriptions such as "continuous partial attention" in the case of individuals continually torn between working, answering emails, and monitoring and responding to various other multimedia alerts that prohibit them from devoting their full and undivided attention to any one task (or person).

Apparently, this takes on some of the characteristics of addiction as well. The author presents examples of the various ways people admit to having lost control in this regard to the extent they have to hide their email habits from others at certain times. The term "Blackberry orphan" is one of the information-age equivalents of the "latchkey kids" of previous generations. The inference is that the detrimental effects on children of having parents perpetually tethered to their electronic media is comparable to the effects of having parents who are literally absent much of the time.

Business Communications -- Problems, Solutions, Management

and Communication Styles, and Organizational Issues

The author describes several different approaches to solutions. One method is to impose a specific rule limiting daily email checking to a particular number of times; another involves the "O" rule, to simply always maintain an empty email in-box. Apparently, some people become so overwhelmed by this problem that they spontaneously martyr their in-boxes, simply deleting everything instead of organizing it or sorting through it.

Even leading software manufacturers have begun working on the problem. Potential solutions such as software capable of interpreting keystroke patterns (and other measurable patterns of user activity) has been developed to manage email notifications automatically. In principle, the computer system would consider whether or not the user is currently busy and suspend any immediate notification of incoming messages so as not to interrupt the user.

Other suggestions for dealing with email and other electronic communications have more to do with behaviors intended to reduce unnecessary exchanges or habits that waste small amounts of time so often that it adds up to a non-inconsequential amount, particularly when multiplied by the total number of affected employees. These include pasting attachments into the body of emails to save the receiver the time of opening attachments; making extensive use of the subject field for short messages that do not have to be opened; and in the choice of content of messages, such as by using specific instead of open-ended questions that invite longer exchanges to communicate the same information capable of being transmitted in one or two exchanges.

Assessment of Problem Resolution

The author's suggested solutions involving formal rules that impose arbitrary limitations on how many times to check email could work, but probably only for users with the ability to break long-standing behaviors and habits "cold turkey" so to speak. Even for them, the use of these approaches has potential pitfalls, as does relying on software solutions. For one example, self-imposed moratoria on checking email could easily result in delayed responses to very important emails (and other messages) that should not be filtered out (even temporarily) by software. Changing behavioral protocols for electronic communications could be very helpful, particularly where users collaborate to minimize informational overload on both ends.