• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.
Bonnie Friedman.

A third of adults go online each day for no particular reason
Internet is just there, dangling over our heads like a mobile full of planets and kitties and smiley faces, and we’re just staring up at it from our cribs like a bunch of little babies. 

188,000,000,000 emails, 60,000,000 facebook updates, 140,000,000 tweets per day

Six top tips on email overload
Six top tips on email overload… How to achieve more efficient use of email, by two experts

Email Overload? Reclaim Your Inbox, Don’t Banish It
Excessive information (including email) is a danger to productivity. It diverts attention, derails trains of thought and increases stress. However, considering Mr. Breton’s concern over the reported high level of distraction caused by reading unnecessary email messages, I’m rather surprised at the alternatives being proposed 

Zero Email Has Zero Chance, But How About An Email Diet?
Atos CEO Thierry Breton is banning company email.There’s been a lot of recent press coverage about a French company’s decision to become a “zero email” company by 2013.

You’ve Got Mail (But Don’t Read It) : One Third of Emails Unread
I recently read that Brits receive an average of 36 emails every day but a third is never read. I wasn’t surprised.

Information Overload Is Causing Illness and Costing Money, Experts Warn
The culture of modern business needs to change, with workers drowning under a deluge of emails and information, experts warned Monday 

Seven Steps to Lower Information Overload
How to keep yourself sane and functional in a world awash in data. There’s a lot being said about the problem of information overload, but not much being actually done about it.

10 Ways to Stop Communication Overload
Communication is as important as it used to be, there’s just way too much of it. Communication is out of control and it’s killing our productivity and effectiveness. Here’s how to make it stop.

7 Steps to Dealing with Information Overload
How do we know what to focus on? How can we deem what is relevant, newsworthy, or beneficial to the maintenance of our employment status without checking it out? How do we deal with info overload?

Is technology driving you crazy - or is it really your staff?
Businesses that are serious about tackling information overload need to look beyond the technology and change their company culture, says silicon.com’s Steve Ranger. I once had a colleague who had a policy of only reading email if it was addressed to him and him alone.

Stress: the curse of modern technology revealed in poll
It seems as though our ability to evolve wisely is not keeping pace with the technological revolution, and that all the wonderful new technologies that we have come to rely on are controlling many of us.

Technology as a Solution: Managing Information Overload
Julie Wedgwood introduced her talk session titled “Managing Information Overload” by speaking about how much information comes our way every single day and how that could impact the way we introduce social networking into our (learning) business 

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have,
determines your true worth - Thomas Carlyle

Clay Johnson on info overload vs. info overconsumption.
We assign blame for our overconsumption in odd ways. Gulp down one too many cupcakes and that’s 100% on you. Yet, if you’re overwhelmed by the fire hose/deluge/tsunami of information, blame must be placed elsewhere: on those glutton-minded information sources or the overall degradation of society or … anywhere really, as long as it doesn’t reflect back on your own lack of control. Information overload seems to always be someone else’s fault. 

How Information Overload is Causing Brain Congestion
I visited him in the lab in Sao Paulo recently and he told me that we humans are suffering from information  indigestion. “We became informivores. We eat information all the time,” he said. Which can produce some unfortunate side effects: “If you eat too much information your brain can’t digest it.” 

5 Cool Ideas for avoiding information overload
The good news is that we live in an information age. The bad news is that there seems to be way too much information. Here are 5 Cool Ideas for avoiding information overload.

Information overload wastes two weeks a year
British workers have to sift through so many emails and electronic documents  that they waste nearly two weeks a year searching for information they have  previously read but then lost.

Email response expectations leading to stress: report
A new report has found that technology is accelerating email response times, creating unrealistic expectations, email overload, error and costly workplace stress. Author of Brilliant Email, published by Pearson in 2011, email management expert Dr Monica Seeley points out that a few years ago a response to an email was expected within a few days or even a week.

Lightening the load on your email inbox  
Email can be a useful tool, but the sheer volume can be overwhelming. This year, around 349 billion emails will be sent worldwide, according to the market research firm Radicati Group Inc. That total is expected to grow to 507 billion by 2013.

6 Ways to Stop Email Overload
A recent report from market research firm The Radicati Group offers some sobering statistics about email use. The number of global email accounts is expected to grow from 3.1 billion in 2011 to almost 4.1 billion by the end of 2015 — an average annual growth rate of 7 percent. Radicati estimates that roughly 350 billion emails will be sent worldwide this year and that the number will increase to 507 billion by 2013. 

Shocker: Most Americans Check Work Email During Holidays  
The majority of employed American adults (68%) with work email accounts check their messages during traditional family holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Among those checking their email, 27% do so multiple times each day. Those checking their accounts are not likely to find empty inboxes as 79% of those polled say they receive emails from clients or colleagues during the holidays.

Too much information: Data overload at work damages staff motivation, survey of 2,000 employees
Employees in the UK are “drowning in droplets rather than floods of data” at work, and are struggling to navigate, organise and digest this collectively, which is costing businesses. 

Do the Digital Natives burn out because of technological overload?  
Do the internet, the constant accessibility and the opportunity of being online 24/7 result in overload? And are particularly the Digital Natives at the risk of burning out early in their career.

We know that this movement is in response to the overwhelming volume of incoming email but we ask if it’s really the answer. We believe that managing the flow well is better than turning off the tap.

Firstly we agree with their actions in getting rid of the slightly-better-than-junk emails – the notifications you subscribed to but haven’t used in some time. Simply unsubscribe.

Secondly, the newsletters and notifications that are useful, create a filter that puts them in a separate folder and schedule a time to read them to get the necessary information out of them.

Adhere to good email etiquette yourself, by only sending succinct relevant emails and spend time training those you correspond with on this.

Schedule a couple of times a day to go through incoming messages (and turn off the new message notification). Incoming messages are no longer just emails but may be coming in from a number of sources. One of the articles above made reference to their boss sending a Twitter DM instead of an email. We’d argue it’s still an incoming message and will take the same processing time. In which case, it is good to have all your messages in one inbox (saves time checking multiple sources) and going through them at set times.

While doing the scheduled message check you are transforming messages into tasks – and these tasks are going to be a part of your workflow (or someone else’s, if delegation is appropriate) over the next few hours, days (or weeks depending on urgency).

So despite the number of people attempting to work without email, we maintain that emails are just one form of incoming messages that every person needs to be able to manage and that getting the right training and finding the right tools is more effective than simply stopping using email.

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Don’t Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! more
• Stop the Insanity: How To Crush Communication Overload more
• Communication Overload: A Simple Technique more
• Information overload more
• Nine Easy Ways To Eliminate E-mail Overload more
• Solving information overload: the role of manual content curation more
• Tech Talk: Tips for managing your information overload more
• New social media? Same old, same old, say Stanford experts more

Statistics

• 59% of respondants say that the amount of info they have to process at work has increased since the economic downturn more

Wisdom

• True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information. Winston Churchill

• Employee stress levels are increased when their inboxes grow by more than 50 messages a day… source
• 46.9% of respondents unable to answer all email… source
• 35% of knowledge workers suffer from health problems traceable back to information overload… source

The reason that stress can have a negative effect is in our biology. The oldest part of our brain is charged with keeping us alive and when it comes across a situation that requires action, it pumps us full of adrenaline so that we can either fight or run away - the “fight or flight” response. When we fight or flee we burn through the adrenaline. The problem in our modern workplaces, is that neither fighting or fleeing are typically seen as appropriate responses, meaning the adrenaline stays within our systems.

Too much adrenaline in our systems can effect every part of our body from hair, brain, mouth, muscles, heart, lungs, digestive tract, reproductive organs to skin. The American Institute of Stress has information outlining the many manifestations of stress. 

Now consider a typical modern work-day where a constant stream of messages arrive demanding a portion of your attention and a response. For many information workers that stream of messages can appear never-ending and they may feel unable to keep up the incoming torrent. These are classic conditions for developing stress related conditions.

In our next blog we look at how we can be healthy in our work even with the ever increasing volumes of information being created in the world today.

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Email overload, Twitter updates, monster slippers… Top 10 ways to avoid distractions at work more
• Email Management Tips for Improved Productivity more
• Your Wheelhouse (In or Out of your Inbox) more
• Conquer Email Overload - Some Quick and Simple Solutions more
• Information Overload – Finding Balance On-Line more
• This Is What a Healthy Information Diet Looks Like more
• Dealing with “Information Overload” more
• Conquering Information Overload more
• Ending email overload more
• Have you got Goldfish Memory Syndrome? more

Statistics

• 53% of people believe that less than half the information they receive is valuable more

Wisdom

• Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.- Albert Einstein
• To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all - Oscar Wilde

With the Evernote integration, our users can login once to UIB and see their Evernote folders along with their message folders. 

The work flow improvements we’ve seen so far from this integration:

• policies, procedures and instructions.  We save them in our Evernote notebooks and then any member of our team (whom we have given access to) can also view these notes.
• getting paper documents around the world.  Being a globally distributed team, on occasion, one office receives a paper document that needs to be commented on by a team member in another country.  The receiver scans the document into Evernote and then in UIB, assigns that note, along with comments to the recipient. The recipient finds this message in their inbox.
• making it easy to comment and ask questions about documents.  One of our team members has a notebook that they scan all their travel receipts into.  In UIB, the accountants have access to this notebook.  Whenever they have a question about an expense, they ask this question via the comments functionality, keeping the integrity of the original record intact.

We’re sure there are more workflow improvements that the Evernote integration can offer and we look forward to finding them.  

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email more
• 11 Tips: Dealing with Information Overload more
• Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now more
• E-Hoarding Is Unhealthy more
• Managing Digital Information Overload – Is Technology The Cause & The Cure? more
• BlackBerry crumble reveals the depth of our email addiction more
• Top 10 Tricks for Dealing With Email Overload more
• Lightening the load on your email inbox: Five tips more
• The Secret to Avoiding Email Overload: Canned Responses more

Statistics

• 40% of Tablet and Smartphone Owners Use Them While Watching TV more
• Sheer overload” is reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, followed closely by “Finding and recovering past emails” and “Keeping track of actions. more
• 25% of all time spent online is devoted to social media more

Wisdom

• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending - Maria Robinson

 - what steps will you take to reduce overload?

We would definitely recommend catching up with the advice given by the founders of Information Overload Awareness Day - this can be found here. Their challenge is to send 10% fewer emails on this day. 

For those still undecided on how to complete this challenge you may want to sign up for our Twitter series that has daily tips on how to manage in our information rich world.

You can find the collected series of tips, statistics and wisdom here in our regular blog.

And of course, there is always the option to sign-up for a month-long free trial of Unified Inbox - the product designed to keep information overload under control.

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• How to stop e-mail overload? Think before you hit send… more
• 5 Tips to Beat Email Overload… more
• Dealing with e-mail is NOT a task… more
• In Praise Of Print Versions… more
• Adaptation and Loss… more
• A list of what not to do can be handy… more