2008: Year of Information Overload?

Interruptions aren't merely annoying; they're also bad for productivity. And when you multiply the interruptions made possible by e-mail, phone calls, text messages, and Twitters across the entire US, the result is lost productivity on a massive scale: $650 billion in a single year.

That's according to research firm Basex, which chose "information overload" as its 2008 "Problem of the Year." Failure to solve the problem will lead to "reduced productivity and throttled innovation." The situation is dire enough that Intel's Nathan Zeldes estimates "the impact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eight hours a week."

This is hardly a news flash, of course. Multitasking has long been recognized to have deleterious effects on productivity. The great irony is that multitasking is meant to improve productivity, but the human brain turns out to be bad at rapid task switching. The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece on the false promise of multitasking in its November edition (subscribers only), using as one of its epigraphs a line by Publilius Syrus: "To do two things at once is to do neither."

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Many Americans share this concern. In a 2007 Pew survey, 49 percent of Americans described themselves as having "few tech assets" and said that constant connectivity was an annoyance, not a liberation.

But young people don't seem to have (yet, anyway) developed the same sense of aggravation toward technology that forces them to multitask. Many choose to do so, in fact. The Kaiser Family Foundation found in a study this year that most junior high and high school students train themselves early in the dark arts of multitasking, with most listening to music or watching TV while they read books or surf the Internet. 30 percent of students even multitask while doing their homework.

Will these students feel the multitasking pinch when they grow up to become the new generation of "knowledge workers," or will constant exposure to interruptions make them more adept at handling the massive torrent of information that flows through modern computers and cell phones? Or is the "do more things at once philosophy" simply a dead end that produces only monstrosities, like the Internet-connected refrigerator we've heard so much about?

On the other hand, multitasking might well produce some benefits; answering queries quickly and jumping to urgent tasks may not be the best strategy for completing long-term work, but it might get breaking items out of the inbox faster. For companies that thrive on pumping out cutting-edge, timely information, information overload and its attendant multitasking requirements could prove to be a competitive necessity.