Information Overload

From Andy Smith, EVP, Managing Director of Global Operations, Palio

As I return to work from a two-and-a-half-week break that saw me finalize wedding preparations, host and entertain two sets of families, get married and enjoy a honeymoon, I’m happy that my decision to stay “offline” throughout my vacation went almost to plan…

Almost to plan meaning that it was virtually impossible to actually shut off completely. First, my email seems to only allow certain amounts of mail before it becomes “full” and even though I can no longer receive email until I clear it out, somehow I keep getting a “system administrator” message telling me I can no longer receive email.

Anyway, to the point: as I sit and plow through the 893 emails that made it, I’m noticing the trend of a lot more “articles of interest” – all kinds of things from How to Sell, Tricks for New Business, Is your Company Ready for the Digital Age?, Is a Company’s Culture More Important than its Business, etc. And whilst some of this is good reading, a lot of it is repurposed and sent multiple times with short notes “some good insights here” or “we should take a look at this” or “you’ve probably seen this, but….”

Keeping up to speed can be nearly impossible these days, with hundreds of daily postings competing for your attention from services like Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. If you think you’re missing something, it’s probably because you are. The amount of online content out there can be way too much to handle. And it’s constantly growing.

The good news is there are lots of filtering devices out there that can help provide order, if not eradicate the problem. One of the more interesting approaches I’ve seen lately are tools that can predict what content you’d like based on what they know about you. They can then, apparently, use that knowledge to highlight content that’s more likely to suit you (I wonder if that also ties you to a database that will target you endlessly).

One app I heard about was the my6sense app for the iPhone. If you access your Twitter, Facebook and RSS content through the app, it uses algorithms to understand you as you go through your streams. For instance, it can see which links you click, how long you look at something, and whether you share the content with others… cool but a little scary.

As the founder of my6sense, Barak Hachamov, says: ”You could read 5,000 pieces of content and find what you want. But usually you want to do some other things with your life.”

Are you being bombarded with too much (irrelevant) information too often? How do you handle it?