Insight, debate and solutions for restoring productivity and work/life balance in this age of Infoglut
The Information Overload Research Group is organizing a private one-day gathering of people who are leading the battle against Information Overload from a diversity of domains such as business, academia, technology, journalism, psychology, and research. If you share our passion, we’d love your attendance in San Francisco on Feb. 25, 2012.
For more details, and registration information, go to http://bit.ly/Ag7kzK .
See you there!
Every year in October Basex, a New York based analyst company that is very active in the war on Info Overload, announces the observance of the worldwide Information Overload Awareness Day. This holiday, which is sponsored by our Information Overload Research Group, may not cure the problem that is exacting a growing toll on the effectiveness and sanity of knowledge workers worldwide, but it is a way to give some reach to the message that something needs to be done about it!
This year the day is Thursday, Oct. 20, and I urge you to devote some time during that day to consider how you can reduce the overload you suffer and the one you create for others – and to disseminate this call for action through your own social channels. If we all try to reduce the overload for those around us, we will make the world a better place.
Happy IOAD, folks!
Five influential authors who have written books on information overload will come together in a “virtual literary salon” produced by IORG – the Information Overload Research Group.
The event takes place on Monday, June 27, 2011, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EDT.
We will be hosting five authors – Dave Crenshaw (author of The Myth of Multitasking), Daniel Forrester (author of Consider), Maggie Jackson (author of Distracted), William Powers (author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry), and Jonathan Spira (author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization).
Each author will discuss two questions – why they wrote their book, and the issues and solutions they consider most relevant.
Click here to register to the event. See you there!
The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is looking to expand its membership, and if you are an Information Overload practitioner or researcher I heartily encourage you to join our ranks.
IORG started off in 2007 as an informal “Infomania Workshop” of some two dozen interested people, and this evolved into an official non-profit interest group that had launched in a face to face conference in NYC in mid-2008. This group comprises academics, industry people, consultants, analysts and others – people from diverse backgrounds that share a common passion to understand and help mitigate the information overload problem that is threatening the productivity and quality of life of good people the world over.
IORG is a young organization, and at this time is busily exploring directions and ideas for furthering this mission. As its co-founder and president, I invite you to look us up at http://www.iorgforum.org and if you share the passion, join our number, participate, communicate, and influence our direction!
October 20 is Information Overload Awareness Day, and we’re holding an online event at 11 AM EDT / 3 PM GMT. Attendance is free if you pledge not to multitask during the event!
Basex, who organize this event every year, secured an impressive lineup of academics, analysts and industry practitioners who will speak about IO and what they’re doing about it. Yours truly will speak too, as president of the Information Overload Research Group.
Register to attend at http://bit.ly/dxpWGN (use code IORGGuest).
I was reading an article about hi-tech airships in IEEE Spectrum when my eye caught in the sidebar a link to another article titled The UAV Data Glut. What do you know – we thought Infoglut was a human problem, and now Unmanned Aerial Vehicles bitch about it too?
Naahh… of course, it isn’t the UAVs that complain; it is humans, the only species that can. The problem, according to the article, is that the super sophisticated drone planes generate more data than humans can look at: “In 2009 alone, the U.S. Air Force shot 24 years’ worth of video over Iraq and Afghanistan using spy drones. The trouble is, there aren’t enough human eyes to watch it all.” And it’s getting worse: the next model of Reaper drone will record 10 video feeds at once!
So it isn’t only email that’s spiraling beyond our ability to read it all; potentially important military information is also doing it. And the analogy doesn’t end there: the two widely different cases both involve nuggets of value – an important email, or the signs of a camouflaged enemy vehicle – buried in tons of irrelevant data. In both cases, technology is enabling the arrival of ever more data without a commensurate growth in human ability to absorb it all…
The solution, the Spectrum article shares, will have to be relegating the analysis to computers (who else?…) There are efforts underway to develop software that can watch the UAV’s boring data streams and identify those few needles in the haystack. Which makes you think – what about us knowledge workers and our flooded Inboxes? Sure, there are some tools that can help – Google Priority Inbox is one of the latest additions – but I suspect the military will get more powerful stuff going, and we’ll have to patiently wait for the civilian market spinoffs that always come later.
Who knows, maybe in a decade we’ll have software so smart that it will be able to write our outgoing mails, read the incoming mail, screen the junk and file the rest – while we take off to read a good book? 
The Information Overload Research Group’s Online Quarterly Event will take place on
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 11:30 a.m. EST (16:30 GMT)
The event is open to everyone interested in the topic of Information Overload (at no charge, of course).
This will be a roundtable discussion around the topic “How Does Information Overload Impact You?” moderated by Jonathan Spira, IORG’s VP of research. He will be joined by Prof. Jonathan Ezor, director of the Institute for Business, Law and Technology at Touro.
The format of the meeting gives attendees an opportunity to talk about the personal impact of Information Overload. Please bring your comments, thoughts, and potential solutions with you.
Everyone is welcome to speak!
Click here to register to the event. See you there!
