So, What Seems to Be the Problem?

You arrive at your desk, ready for another day.  Then it hits you — unfocussed overwhelming frustration.  Your inbox already has over 100 unread emails and you haven’t even had your first cup of coffee.

The first recorded use of the phrase information overload was by the futurologist Alvin Toffler in 1970, when he predicted that the rapidly increasing amounts of information being produced would eventually cause people problems.  This is because they’d have too much information to make rapid, informed decisions.  He foresaw that massive amounts of historical information would need to be sifted (this was prior to Google and Bing searches), plus a high rate of new information would be added daily.

The problems with information include not just its quantity but also its quality: we can’t ascertain the validity of everything we read, or hear, or see, but to experience it is to tuck away some trace, to acquire it.  Accumulated traces change us.  We remember some of what we’ve read later, but no longer remember the source or the circumstances.  We rewrite our memories when we remember them, so information we suspected at the time was unreliable, we may now think is likely true. One way to cope with this is to sample several news or knowledge summaries and go with the consensus. Or to join a group of people like us in some way and see how they seem to feel and accept that.  Meanwhile, misinformation can build up, both in our heads and on the web.  This phenomenon is termed information pollution.  It’s worse today than in the past because the lowered cost of self-publishing means no one has validated a lot of what you read.

Today, it’s possible to process more information in one day than most of our ancestors did in their whole lives (unless they did a lot of travelling).

• 46 million mobile apps are downloaded from the Apple App Store each day.
• The average number of apps owned by a smartphone user is 41, a 28% increase since last year.
• The iOs App market sales run rate is $4 billion a year.

In his book The Shallows, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review Nicholas Carr worries that the flood of digital information is changing not only our habits, but even our mental capacities.  From the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer, our brains change in response to our experiences.  The printed book serves to focus attention, promoting deep and creative thought.  In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.  Forced to scan and skim to keep up, we diminish our ability to pay sustained attention, reflect deeply, or remember what we’ve learned.  Greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge.  Carr says that people become addicted to “mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social or intellectual nourishment”.  Can this situation be fixed?  Should it be?

Technologist Clay Johnson advises the elimination of “push” or notifications, which he says pull people’s attention away from their work.  He also advises that people stop using their smartphones as alarm clocks because then the phone is the first thing that people see when they wake up — so they often check their email right away and then stay hooked in all day.

Some cognitive scientists and graphic designers emphasise the distinction between raw information and organised information that we can actually use when thinking.  In this view, information overload may be better viewed as an organisation / classification underload, suggesting that the problem is not so much the volume of information but the fact that we cannot discern how to use it well in the raw or biased form in which it is presented to us.
 

Why Isn’t Something Being Done?

So if information overload is such a problem, why don’t we do something about it?  We could if we wanted, couldn’t we?  “TMI” or Too Much Information is an acronym alluding to information overload but usually it’s used in jest as if too much information should just be ignored.  Maybe that isn’t a bad idea.  But how many people bother to tune their spam filters?  How many turn off the little window that announces a new email?  Who signs off social media because there’s just too much junk there?  Who turns off smartphones in meetings to ensure no distractions?  (They turn them to vibrate, maybe.)

Why do people make themselves so accessible?  Possibly because there’s everlasting hope of something new and exciting coming along — something may arrive today that enlivens the mundane present.  We don’t want to miss out on an email promising a new job, a text message offering a new relationship, or an RSS feed with exciting news.  Every communication offers the frisson of a possible life-changing information event.

There’s also inertia.  When did you last redefine the structure of your email folders or readjust your RSS feed?  Whatever your information environment is today, it’ll likely be the same next month or even next year.  Companies like it when people sign up for ongoing email broadcasts because they’re unlikely to take the time to unsubscribe.

Don’t undervalue your own attention.  Don’t open junk mail; don’t watch junk television.  Unfortunately, it takes an initial investment of attention to subsequently save attention.  Most people just aren’t willing to invest because they don’t have enough upfront to spare before the payback kicks in.

Email remains a major source of information overload, as people struggle to keep up with the rate of incoming messages.  As well as filtering out unsolicited commercial messages (spam), users also have to contend with the growing use of email attachments in the form of lengthy reports, presentations, and media files.  Rather than responding to every email right away, users should delete unnecessary emails and then sort the remainder into action or reference folders first.  Only then, begin the first reply.

In an office, the problem of information overload can spread like a virus.  If one person is suffering from it, he or she tends not to process information being received very well.  Rather than summarizing a report or document, it’s passed on whole to everyone else in the office.  Now, the rest of the office must wade through 80 pages to find the few key pieces of information relevant to their jobs and the decisions they need to make.  This is costly.
 

A Few Commonly-Proposed Suggestions

Our life is frittered away by detail…
simplify, simplify.

– Henry David Thoreau
 

• Have beginning-of-day and end-of-day rituals.
• Set up rules for times people can reach you.  Periodically disconnect (whether you want to or not).  This is because minds need a break — being focused for long periods of time is stressful.  Focus should always be alternated with periods of relaxation.  Build in “hidden moments” where you can be by yourself to mentally sift through what you’ve been reading or hearing and to distract yourself from troubling problems.
• Start your work day by making a short list of your most important tasks.  Then don’t do anything else before doing the first thing on your short list — don’t check email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online forums, or news sites first.
• Regularly review your files (both hard and soft copies).  Spend at least 10 minutes every day at this task.  Toss or archive anything you no longer need.
• Only check your email a set number of times per day, at relatively fixed times, and for a maximum of 15 minutes each time.  “Firewall” your attention.
• If you surf the Internet for research, set a timer (otherwise life can devolve into an unending search for still more wisdom).  Each hour, stand up, take at least a couple of steps, and stretch.  This is important for both physical and mental health.
• Stop multi-tasking for the sake of it and either single task or prioritize more efficiently.  Try doing fewer things better.  (Multitasking is not complexity.)
• Cut back on consuming information for the fun of it except during set-aside times.
• Take the time to remove your name from irrelevant lists.
• Get plenty of sleep; this helps you retain more of what you learn during the day.
• Use software that allows you to maximise your capabilities.
• Try to elicit a laugh at least once a day (if not from someone else, then from yourself).

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand.
The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

– Alexander Graham Bell
 

This Is a New Thing, Right?

Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3rd century BC).  The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century.

The printing press was first developed around 1453; Gutenberg’s new technology moved beyond the experimental phase by 1480 and spread to some two dozen major urban centres, plus there were other short-lived presses in operation from time to time.  Contemporaries at first raved about the great speed with which books could be printed, and also about the drop in price — by 80% on one contemporary’s estimate in 1468.  But around 1500, humanist scholars began to bemoan new problems: printers in search of profit, they complained, rushed to print manuscripts without attention to the quality of the text, and the sheer mass of new books distracted readers from the focus on the ancient authors most worthy of attention.  Printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libellous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness,” wrote Erasmus in the early 16th century, in the kind of tirade that might seem familiar to anyone exhausted by what they find online today.

In the 18th century the political theorist Montesquieu took notes on the backs of playing cards, which were blank in those days.  His younger contemporary Carl Linnaeus made his own slips for recording the characteristics of plants, from which he created a taxonomic system still in use today.  The slips, ordered and sorted, would eventually inspire both the index card and the library card catalogue, thus allowing data to be systematically categorised.

What we share with our ancestors is the sense of excess.  Most Internet searches will turn up vastly more results than can be used.  Too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good, has been the subtext of complaints about overload from the beginning.  But like the early modern compilers, we too are devising ways to cope.  In some ways, our key methods of successfully coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century.  We still need to select, summarise, and sort.  For now, we need an element of human judgement (to refine the filtering) and human attention (to oversee the process).
 

Too Much Information, Too Little Concentration

For those people yet to hop on the Burnout Bandwagon, just a quick alert: there’s almost no room left.  Everyone seems to be knee deep in burnout, whether socially or at work.  Burnout is the new orange, and is often exacerbated by continual peer, customer, and superior surveillance.  Furthermore, you can no longer read a column or check a score without being pitched, solicited or hit up for a “follow” or a “like”.  Some sites launch full-on videos you can’t skip.  It’s officially out of control.

What causes burnout?

• Lack of control:  You have insufficient ability to influence decisions that affect your job — such as schedules, assignments, workload, or resources.
• Unstated job expectations:  It is unclear the degree of authority you have or the expectations your superiors have.
• Dysfunctional workplace dynamics:  You may have an office bully, undermining colleagues, or micromanaging boss.
• Value mismatch:  You may not like their way of doing business or handling grievances.
• Poor job fit:  Your interests and skills may not align.
• Extremes of activity:  Your job may be monotonous.  Or it may be chaotic.
• Lack of social support:  You may be isolated, either at work or at home.
• Work-life imbalance:  Your work may take a disproportionate amount of time and/or effort.

But read a few Schopenhauer essays from the mid-1800s.  He was concerned that people were becoming more dehumanised, more distracted.  He felt that virtually no one had enough time anymore.  His gripe was far from novel, even then.  See what’s happening as a repeating pattern.  Evaluate your options.  Adjust your attitudes.  Seek support.  Assess yourself.  Exercise.  Focus.  Take regular breaks.  Erect virtual partitions.

But it’s starting to become clear that the phenomenon of digital omnipresence is having a more pernicious effect than we’ve seen in past ages.  We’re obsessed with the present tense like never before.  More and more people report anxiety over things like in-boxes stuffed with unanswered emails.  Others have trouble falling asleep after staring at an illuminated screen all day.  We collectively suffer from a paralytic inability to voluntarily turn ourselves away.

Technology, for the most part, is neutral.  It has no ulterior motivations of its own… yet.  But humankind may, and therein lies the trouble.  Most of us are born with the thought that life should be fair.  And pleasant.  Not out of our control.  And what of those in whom the motives for justice, kindness, charity, and the like, do seem to appear?  Whether conscious or not, the true motive is ulterior.  Among other things, “it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it.”  At virtually every waking moment we are host to one motive or another, even though the motive might sometimes be so faint as to be scarcely noticed.  Moreover, as soon as one motive is satisfied, another immediately “pops up to take its place,” as though it had been lurking behind the scenes all the while, just waiting for opportunity.  Human motives are hierarchically structured, and their arrangement within the hierarchy is defined by their respective levels of urgency / intensity / priority.  If you want to reduce information coming your way, you can help at least a little.
 

Managing Information

Personal information management (PIM) refers to the activities people perform in order to acquire, organise, maintain, retrieve and use personal information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and communications for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfil a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, and so forth).  There are 6 ways in which information can be personal: it is owned by you, it is about you, it is directed toward you, it was sent or posted by you, it was experienced by you, or even just that it is relevant to you.

One ideal of PIM is that people should always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet the current need.  Technologies and tools such as personal information managers help people spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone activities such as looking for information they know they have, just not where.  They then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information they have at hand.  Now, they can get more things done, or to simply just enjoy (re)acquainting themselves with information itself.  (There’s an undeniable pleasure in learning, in knowing).

There are a number of tools available for managing personal information, but these tools can become a part of the problem, leading to “information fragmentation”.  Different devices and applications often come with separate ways of storing and organising information.  Integrating information from many different sources may cause more problems than it solves.

Personal information can include any of the following:

Managing Relationships

The foregoing having been said, at this point I’d like to briefly mention my own attempts at managing data.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an information industry term for methods, software and Internet capabilities that help people manage their relationships in an organised way and in sufficient detail. It allows the formation of individualised associations with others, with the idea of improving mutual satisfaction (it helps us to be popular, in other words). While the acronym CRM is most commonly used to describe a business-customer relationship, it’s also used to denote aids toward managing (prioritising, organising) business contacts, and clients. And it can do much more.

Organisations frequently look for ways to personalise online experiences. The biggest benefit most businesses realise when moving to a CRM system comes directly from having all important data stored and accessed from a single location. Before CRM systems, it was spread out: documents, emails, mobile phone data, sticky notes, and even index cards and Rolodex entries. Storing it all in a central location (ideally in the cloud) gives everyone with a need to know immediate access when they need it. Collaborations are easier, and CRM systems help one to develop efficient, improved business processes and systems for identifying, targeting, acquiring, and retaining the best mix of information to have on-hand.

Customer-centric relationship management (CCRM) is a style of customer relationship management that focuses on customer preferences instead of customer leverage. This is a nascent sub-discipline of traditional customer relationship management; to take advantage of changes in communications technology. Customer centric organisations help customers make better decisions and this also helps drive profitability. A CCRM adds value by engaging customers in individual, interactive relationships. It allows tailored marketing, one-on-one customer service, boosting loyalty, and providing what customers actually want.

A CRM fundamentally involves treating contacts differently based on the assumption that each is different from the others and has unique benefits and requirements.
 

Now, I need something from you.

We developed Elephant CRM initially to help our company manage its own data and relationship needs.  We liked the result enough that we decided to take it to market.  I’m not trying to sell anything — right now, our software is free.  What I need is a few people who will look it over, maybe try it out, and give me their opinions.  Is it intuitive?  Easy or hard to use?  Is the documentation adequate?  Is there something missing that should be there?

What Elephant mostly does is manage relationships.  You can define any association type you like (works for, owns stock in, is divorced from, plays tennis every Tuesday morning with, or what have you) and a connection is made and propagated to the record of both of the involved parties.  Furthermore, you can send yourself reminders that only you can see (that drop off after they email you on the date and time you set).  You can leave notes to yourself that only you can see on almost every part of every record — or you can let everyone else (other users of your own CRM) see some or all of them.

We think it can be used as a personal information manager or as a customer relationship manager.  Do you agree?

Like a lot of start-ups, we produced a more richly-featured version of the quick-and-dirty programme we wrote for ourselves to keep track of our own company’s relationships.  Elephant has proven to be a usefully flexible platform.  We think you will like it.  There’s a short User’s Manual on the forum page if you need it.  You can also visit the sandbox page where there are 5 sample CRMs: an American animation / design shop; a Canadian school district’s substitute teacher roster; a movie script; an off-world performing arts complex; and the Faraday family’s household records.

ANY comments, both positive and negative, would be very helpful.  If you like the software, you’re free to keep using it.

Thanks.
 

Sources

 
“A H Maslow’s Vision of Human Nature” by Richard Lowry, adapted from the Editor’s Introduction to the 3rd edition of Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, New York: Wiley, 1999, date of this article undenoted, http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/maslow1.html
“CRM (customer relationship management)” by Margaret Rouse, TechTarget, no date given, http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/CRM
“CRM – Customer Relationship Management”, Webopedia, http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CRM.html
“Customer Relationship Management”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management
“Dealing with information overload: The art of letting go” by Jane Genovese, Learning Fundamentals, 15 Jan 2014, http://learningfundamentals.com.au/blog/dealing-with-information-overload-the-art-of-letting-go/
 
“Developing Razor Sharp Focus with Zen Habits Blogger Leo Babauta” by Jane Genovese, Learning Fundamentals, 22 July 2011, http://learningfundamentals.com.au/blog/developing-razor-sharp-focus-with-zen-habits-blogger-leo-babauta/
Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction by Leo Babauta, http://focusmanifesto.s3.amazonaws.com/FocusFree.pdf
“How To Control Information Overload Before It Controls You” by Lisa Rickwood, Par Excellence Magazine, no date given anywhere, http://www.parexcellencemagazine.com/motivation-and-self-improvement/how-to-control-information-overload-before-it-controls-you.html
“Information Overload” by Chris Nickson, Life in the Fastlane, 8 July 2009 rev. 5 July 2014, http://lifeinthefastlane.com/information-overload/
“Information Overload”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload
 
“Information Overload, the Early Years” by Ann Blair, Today’s Globe, 21 October 2010, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/11/28/information_overload_the_early_years/?page=full
“Job Burnout: How to spot it and tale action” by Mayo Clinic Staff, Adult Health, Healthy Lifestyle section, 8 December 2012, http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642
“Personal Information Management”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_management
“Personal Information Manager”, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_manager
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, W W Norton & Company, 2011.
 
“Streaming Burnout” by Alex Lyras, Lyrasisms, 2 June 2014, http://03258d8.netsolhost.com/WordPress/?p=3895
“There’s an App for Everything, Including YouTube’s Capture” by Beth Ruth, Now You Know: Emerging Media & the Market, 17 December 2012, http://bruth5112.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/theres-an-app-for-everything-including-youtubes-capture/
“Understanding Information Overload” by N Ingebrigtsen, Infogineering: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Information Overload, no date given, http://www.infogineering.net/understanding-information-overload.htm
“Why We Don’t Care about Information Overload” by Tom Davenport, Harvard Business Review, 8 December 2009, http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/12/why-we-dont-care-about-informa/
 

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