I love facts. Here are some of my favorites from Basex, a research firm focusing on issues companies face as they navigate our information overloaded world.
According to Basex, information has become the great leveler of society and business. In 2010, Information Overload cost the U.S. economy almost one trillion dollars!
- A minimum of 28 billion hours are lost each year to IO in the United States.
- Reading and processing just 100 email messages can occupy over half of a worker's day!
- It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30-second interruption.
- For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an email, eight hours are lost. Do the math.
- 58% of government workers spend half of the workday filing, deleting or sorting information at a cost of almost $31 billion dollars annually.
- 66% of workers feel they don't have enough time to get all of their work done (I think this is probably very conservative!)
- 94% of those surveyed at some point felt overwhelmed by information to the point of incapacitation.
- Information Overload has caused people to lose their ability to manage thoughts and ideas, contemplate and even reason and think. (I always say that thinking is a lost art form.)
And this is just for starters!
I think you get the idea.
The good news is that there are solutions and ways of slowly but surely attacking the problem. The first step is recognizing that this is potentially a problem for you personally and your company/work environment professionally. The second and maybe even more difficult step is asking for help.
Do what you can to have a productive day! And get in touch with me at nancy@nancysnell.com if you want to have a conversation.
Warmly,
Coach Nancy