Damming the Tide of Information

By Mark Fulton

I had lunch with my buddy Max Bizmore the other day. The moment he walked into the restaurant I knew something was wrong. He was washed-out, slack-jawed and bug-eyed. As he slumped into his seat, Max acknowledged my greeting with a perfunctory handshake and mumbled, “Too much, too much.”

Without even exchanging pleasantries, Max began muttering, more to himself than to me, “Phone calls, faxes, memos. E-mail, voice mail, snail mail. Newspapers, newscasts, newsletters. Magazines, cable TV ... the Internet!” Max sank a little lower into his seat and murmured, “Too much.”

That’s when I realized my friend had succumbed to an insidious malady of modern times, the scourge of our high-tech society: Infoglut, the information overload epidemic that threatens to turn us all into blathering burnouts like poor Max.

Information is the sustenance of business. It nourishes the corporate body and empowers us to serve our customers with greater speed and precision. Because business thrives on information, we invest heavily in systems to produce, store and analyze it, which naturally opens the floodgates to an even greater deluge of data.

Unfortunately, our unprecedented access to information has ushered in a new era in which we are being inundated with input. The Age of Infoglut is upon us and we are paying a heavy price in lowered productivity.

Just sorting through the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on our desk every day can add hours to a workweek — not to mention stress to a psyche. One British psychologist claims to have identified a new mental disorder caused by too much information. He calls it Information Fatigue Syndrome.

It’s difficult enough to deal with information that might be even remotely helpful or interesting. But what about the other stuff — the data smog that pollutes our lives at work and at home? What about junk mail, Jerry Springer, spam and cybersludge? Infoglut rouses us with radio talk shows and lulls us to sleep with Larry King. It numbs our brainpower and nullifies our belief that there really are things worth paying attention to.

All right, enough grousing. What can you do to turn back the tide of trivia that floods your office and your home? Here are some ideas:

• Eliminate periodicals that go from your mailbox to the waste can without being read. Save a tree and your sanity by admitting that most of those purchases from Publisher’s Clearinghouse are just cluttering your credenza. Let the subscriptions expire and don’t look back.
• Get off junk mail lists by contacting the Direct Marketing Association. Their Mail Preference Service, which includes more than 500 major national mailing houses, can get your name off many computerized mailing lists. Write to DMA at Mail Preference Service, c/o DMA, P.O. Box 9008, Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008.
• Perform information triage. Information should be sorted by importance. Leave the e-mail about the company softball game until after you’ve read the memo about the new customer service policy. Determine what needs to be dealt with immediately, what can go in the “read later” pile and what can be discarded without being read.
• Don’t indulge in download dementia. Just because you can save an Internet document to your hard drive doesn’t mean you should. Ask yourself if you really need to capture that information now. If you do, use the FREE method to deal with it immediately: File it; Refer it to others; Eliminate it; Execute the task required. Actually, this system works with anything that finds its way to your desk.
• Reduce your own data-smog emissions. Keep your correspondence and voicemail messages short and concise and resist the urge to engage in messaging meltdown. That’s what happens when you try to reinforce your messages with other messages. Do you leave a voice-mail message that you have faxed a report and then send an e-mail to confirm its delivery? Stop it.

Need professional help to overcome clutter? Call the National Association of Professional Organizers in Austin, Texas at (512) 206-0151.

If you’re a committed couch potato and can’t survive without soaking up a few hours of television, that’s your right. Hey, this is America. However, may I suggest that you declare one night of the week to be a TV-free evening? Read a book. Do the newspaper crossword. Talk to your spouse. Go ahead — get radical.

As we stand on the threshold of the 21st century, it may be time to heed the words of a 19th-century American: “Our life is frittered away by detail,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. “Simplify, simplify.”

Sounds a lot better than, “Too much, too much.”


© Copyright 1999 Mark S. Fulton