Commentary: Information overload a time killer

In the 30 minutes it's taken me to open a new Word document, read three articles about my most recent post and decide how to start writing, I've gotten eight emails.

My TweetDeck browser has alerted me to 17 new tweets from the 300-odd people I follow. My phone has rung once, my laptop has popped up a small window telling me my anti-virus software is updated and a text message has arrived on my mobile phone. If the research that says that a 30-second interruption leads to five minutes of recovery time is indeed true, the entire last half-hour and then some has been lost.

And this was all after I decided what I was going to write about. That idea came from my RSS reader -- yet another source for news -- which pointed me to a blog post at Leadership Now (www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog) about the overwhelming amount of information most workers experience in today's "knowledge economy." The post offers a snapshot of a new book on the topic called "Overload!" by Jonathan Spira, who runs a research firm that studies worker productivity in our constant-interruption world.

We're all aware of how much phone calls and text messages can interrupt work flow, what a time killer Twitter can become and how inexplicably irritating the "reply-all" button is.

But the numbers Spira trots out are still jaw-dropping. He estimates that reading and processing 100 email messages can occupy more than half of a worker's day.

For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an email, eight hours of productivity are lost. And he notes that one Fortune 500 company thinks that an incapacitating amount of information costs the firm $1 billion in lost productivity per year.

Wrestling with this is fast becoming a serious issue for many companies and workplaces. The Economist recently noted that management consultants are spotting an opportunity for new clients -- McKinsey & Co. has come up with three principles for business leaders to push to keep workers productive and not overly distracted.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has urged employees not to email over the weekends so as to not create false urgency. French IT services company Atos Origin plans to go email free in the next three years to cut down on what it calls the "information pollution."

If that weren't enough to prove that the movement fighting the data deluge is gaining steam, there's now a nonprofit group devoted to tackling the problem: The Information Overload Research Group was launched in February to "conquer information overload" and "restore sanity" to working professionals. A buzz word has been coined. Blue State Digital founder Clay Johnson has a site called InfoVegan, "a blog about information obesity, information diets and civic accountability."

And for those who aren't so worried about email distractions but think PowerPoint is the world's worst productivity killer, there is this recent news from Switzerland, where an organization is devoted to ending the use of that ubiquitous and maddeningly dull software. The man behind the effort, Matthias Pohm, -- who is also trying to promote his book, "The PowerPoint Fallacy" -- claims that PowerPoint costs Switzerland $2.1 billion each year. With 100,000 signatures, he will be able to hold a national referendum banning the program.

Something tells me that effort would do well in the United States, too, especially in the military.

But since such a ban is unlikely, and your company dropping email just as much so, there are a few things leaders can do in the meantime to help fight the war on info overload:

1. Stop sending emails that say nothing more than "thanks!"

2. Avoid the "reply-all" button whenever possible.

3. Try using flip charts instead of PowerPoint.

4. Reserve "thinking time" in your schedule, and encourage employees to log off at least every once in a while, no matter how foreign that idea may be in your office.