Too much information: what kinds of skills do you need to survive in a world gone mad with messaging?

The onset of technology was supposed to make our lives easier, but it has become more like an onslaught. We have e-mail, voicemail, fax, cell phones, pagers, the Internet -- tools that are meant to reduce workloads, serve our information needs and make our jobs less stressful. Instead, they often leave us with a feeling that 24 hours in a day just isn't enough.

This onslaught has led to the recent phenomenon of information overload. Data is doubling at an unprecedented rate -- but more importantly, our ability to access this information, or for it to access us, is accelerating. The problem, however, has less to do with technology and more to do with human behaviour and an inability to adapt to the info age.

"We have the technology, we have the tools in place but we haven't focused on how people use the tools and an awful lot of our work is on the behavioural side," says Mark Vale, president of Information Management & Economics Inc. (IME) in Toronto. "It's not on the architecture or infrastructure side because the infrastructure is there -- it's the human behaviour with these tools that we don't address specifically."

He says we need to focus on information management and use practices, skills and confidence levels. If we started to address these issues, he says, the notion of information overload would stop becoming a euphemism for "I need some help."

Not everyone is comfortable with technology, but no one likes to admit they don't know how to use an Internet search engine or create a sub-directory. "If you have an individual who regularly prints out their e-mail, then they are not working in an electronic environment," says Vale. "The knee-jerk reaction is to move to a comfortable environment like print out the e-mails or give me a copy of that rather than reading it on screen, and if that's the case then we need to address those confidence issues rather than what I would call work style."

This lack of user confidence is compounded by the increasing number of messages a person receives each day, whether by voicemail, e-mail or fax. The first thing a person needs to look at, says Vale, is the relevancy of these messages. Broadcast e-mails, for example, where organizations send out messages to all employees -- which would be better posted on an intranet -- can be a particular nuisance.

"I know of one department that sends out broadcast e-mail messages about upcoming brown bag lunches with the deputy and they go out to a national audience," says Vale. "Now if I'm sitting in Saskatoon, I don't think I'm going to make a brown bag lunch with the deputy. It's not appropriate and it doesn't need to be sent (to the entire organization). What people in Saskatoon or Edmonton need to see, perhaps on an intranet, is what was discussed at the brown bag lunch, but not a notice that it's going to happen."

We live in such a communications-saturated environment that all these devices originally envisioned to save us time have actually caused us to waste time, says K.K. Campbell, president of K.K. Campbell.Com in Toronto. "We live in an interruption-driven workplace and every time a task comes up that has to take away an employee's attention, it causes them to lose not just time in dealing with the task, but causes them to lose time in the transition."

Campbell gets anywhere from 100 to 300 pieces of e-mail a day, much of it unsolicited. "How do I deal with it? You have to start using filters -- I think your first line of defense in good e-mail usage is to become filter-savvy," he says. A filter will bring important e-mail to your attention immediately, relegate less important e-mail to a secondary directory you can look at later, or kill it if it's junk.

He says it's also important to clear out your inbox on a regular basis and never let it fill up past a certain number -- either read it and delete it, write a cursory reply or stick it into a secondary directory -- so you don't get overloaded and miss the important messages. As for reducing junk, posting to public forums is one of the easiest ways to start getting unsolicited messages, so a person might want to consider using a second e-mail address like a free hotmail account to do their public hosting.

Vale agrees filtering agents can be useful, but says the people using the filtering agents are usually the people with the highest confidence levels. Filters, he says, require a sophistication on the part of the user to set them up so "they're not a magic bullet to solve the problems of people who don't have the skills or confidence to be able to use the tools properly."

Besides an increase in the number of messages, there has also been an increase in the velocity with which messages travel. In the days when fax was the main method of business communications, people expected a response within a day or two. With e-mail and voicemail, people expect an almost-immediate response. Also, senders of messages use inappropriate media or don't structure the message in a way that facilitates easy processing of that message. For example, ira person's voicemail alerts callers that he or she will be in meetings and won't be checking messages, this provides far more information than simply saying, "Hi, I'm not at my desk right now, please leave a message." It also reduces callers' expectations of when calls will be returned.

"It's not so much that we have too much information, but too few and too imprecise questions," says Dr. Richard Earle, executive director of the Canadian Institute of Stress, a charitable foundation based in Toronto. "When in doubt send an e-mail -- and of course that leads to a sense of lack of direction and that leads to a sense of overload."

He says it comes down to the basic issue of personal return on investment -- what are you getting back from adding yet another chunk of information to your stack? It's the extent to which you feel you can control, filter out and bar the door against data that may add a little bit to your understanding of a situation, but isn't worth the effort. It's the extent to which you can tell other people not to send you anymore and tell yourself not to pursue anymore.

"Some people become addicted and pursue more and more," he says. "I don't have a cell phone -- my wife has one and on the very rare occasion I'll borrow hers, but I don't want people phoning me in my car for example, because driving is one of my most creative (times), so I've really tried to set limits as to when I can be reached."

Over time, information overload can lead to chronic stress-related health problems. At the heart of almost all stress reactions, says Earle, is uncertainty. "Humans are built even at the best of times to be highly pessimistic. In the face of uncertainty, the invariable response people have is, 'Gosh, I wonder how this is going to go wrong for me' and when people have those negative question marks they feel threatened and that's what generates a lot of the stress at a biochemical as well as an emotional level in the body," he says.

"So information overload or fatigue -- certainly people under high stress become more pessimistic, they become fatalistic, they feel more helpless, a little more hopeless, and it can reach a point where they feel literally paralyzed. There's just so many uncertainties that they fear doing anything and it's at that point that the fatigue sets in."

While people have a tendency to feel like they're on a leash -- or 17 leashes Earle says they have to realize they always have a choice and should take some self-serving measures, such as deciding if they really need a cell phone or need to upgrade to the next megahertz level. If you kid yourself that you're forced to do this, he adds, that will double your stress level right there.

"We still have 24 hours in the day, but we're trying to pack 10 times as many things into that 24 hours so the way we do it is we become ultra-wired you have your e-mail, your voicemail, your cell phone, and then you may have more than one voicemail box that you're checking. You can't get away from work," says Shalini Gupta, a consulting manager with Ernst & Young in Toronto.

"It comes down to some basic time management principles. One of the things we have to learn -- particularly people in the consulting profession we have to learn how to say no when we can't do anymore and it's very difficult because the society here doesn't want to hear that, they don't want to hear no. Also, we have to embrace technology in terms of looking for the systems that allow us to be connected but not overconnected."

She says while technology tools can help, the problem lies in how a person learns to use these tools -- while they make everything more accessible, they also push us into a position where we feel we need to know everything.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jun 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved