Information overload is supposed to be the scourge of 2008, reports Ars Technica, and one way to address it, according to this news article referencing the same report, is to be smarter with our e-mail.
E-mail is like cars in an urban metropolis; neither effective nor efficient due to the fact that there are just too many of them. Instead of optimizing an almost-dead technology, I’d suggest using better tools. Set up blogs for one-to-many communications; have wikis for projects, teams and departments; and use instant messaging for quick person-to-person communications. Then keep track of it all with a feed aggregator. With these tools and practices in place, e-mail can be reserved for more official traffic, like sending an invoice or a proposal.
The kids know this already. E-mail is only used to communicate with your parents.
Information overload is probably not the fundamental problem.
It is hard to tell if a house is poorly insulated during summer. On the coldest days of winter you can easily tell . As the information rate increases unproductive processes and people become more aware of the underlying productivity problems. If we are dealing with unproductive processes and people blogs, wikis, etc. will only slightly numb the pain.
Productivity is closely linked to Cost of Capital.Interest rates have been low for many years now. When the interest rates increase
low productivity becomes more apparent. Cost of Capital is closely linked to energy supply so we can expect interest rates to increase
eventually.
Productivity is a bit like Quality. (It doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen.)
To make Quality happen, we had to invent Quality Control, Quality Assurance, Quality Awareness,
Quality Management, TQM, Kaitzen,ISO9000, etc.. Some countries even had to implement national programs before they achieved the critical mass to solve the quality problem.
The canadian manufacturing sector, hit by the weak US dollar, is starting to understand that productivity is important.
One of the problems that we are going to face around productivity is that productivity (and quality) is not sufficiently taught in canadian schools and colleges. There is certainly no information overload about productivity.