From Information Overload to Information Breaking Point

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Nov 30, 2010 Comments

1 comment

If you thought our coverage of Americans remaining over-worked straight through the holiday season was disturbing, then brace yourself. LexisNexis has helped bring to light a much more unnerving reality: professionals from coast to coast are so overwhelmed by the amount of daily information, they're going as far as deleting it before it's even read. In other words, we're on a beeline to a complete meltdown.

Digitally Drowning

LexisNexis’s 2 010 International Workplace Productivity Survey polled 1,700 white collar workers from five different countries: the United States, China, South Africa, United Kingdom and Australia. The questions drilled respondents on their experience of, and attitudes toward, information in the workplace.

To say the results were dismal across the board would be an understatement. For instance, professionals from each country reported that the following scenarios happen at least once a week:

Employees deliver incomplete documents, e-mails or other communications because the necessary information or materials could not be found on time.
Employees experience trouble recreating how time was spent for billing purposes.
Employees must recreate a document because a previously-created version could not be found.
A deadline is missed because of trouble finding necessary information.
A meeting or appointment is missed because of scheduling miscommunications.

To make things worse, failing economic conditions have sent us on an even deeper nosedive. "They survey shows that on average, white collar professionals spend over half (51%) of their work day managing incoming information, rather than actually using it to do their jobs," explained LexisNexis President and CEO of Legal Markets, Mike Walsh. "For American professionals, this is reportedly a 10 percent increase in time receiving information since 2008."

What Does an Information Breaking Point Look Like?

If we continue on down the ignorance-is-bliss path, things stand to worsen — globally — before they improve. Walsh illustrated this with a few more rough facts:

A majority of workers in every market (62%, on average) admit that the quality of their work suffers at times because they can’t sort through the information they need fast enough.
Approximately one in two (52%) white collar professionals report feeling demoralized when they can’t manage all the information that comes their way at work.

"Demoralized" is a pretty serious word to use in a work context, but if things have sunk so low that professionals are simply trashing their communications before fully reading them, it fits.

"The heavy toll on employee morale and productivity will eventually come to bear on the bottom line," continued Walsh. "Ultimately, the resulting problems for firms could range anywhere from lost productivity and profits to lost talent."

Tools for Turnaround

Data management tools and features of all shapes and sizes are out there, waiting patiently for you to embrace them with joy and vigor. As far as e-mail management goes, there are several to choose from: Google Priority Inbox, Varonis DatAdvantage for Exchange, and M-Files v7.0 are just a few of the newer ones.