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Information Rage Coming Soon To an Office Near You
digitaldc submitted the latest excuse to get a few days off: "A survey released this week revealed the latest affliction to hit white-collar workers. It's called 'information rage,' and almost one in two employees is affected by it. Overwhelmed by the torrent of data flooding corporate workplaces, many are near the breaking point.
The aftermath of all this is the deterioration in quality that occurs when flustered employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard. Almost three quarters of the survey's respondents declared their work has suffered as a result."
I don't have time for all this.
Their they're doing there hair.
As a long time worker in a G8 tax department, information overload has been going on for years. People get pissed because they don't have the best tools for the job, but I've never seen 'rage'.
"It's not our fault that we falsified 103,000 notarized documents, committing an act of perjury each time. It was information overload."
I suspect the issue is more "Foster's overload" than "information overload."
employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard
I'd think this is the human condition, at least since the invention of the printing press.
In addition, everybody has a level at which they can effectively cull information, and a level of work that individually and organizationally is considered 'standard'. Unless more information actually produces a lower quality of work than a smaller amount of information -- with the same distribution of relevance -- would.
It seems like this would boil down to prioritization more than anything else.
I believe this has been a problem since the beginning of time. When managers see this "symptom" they need to "hire an additional employee". Some people might even say that managing employees workloads is the job of management.
Some people suffer analysis paralysis, other suffer from the 'where do I start' problem and give up.
David Allen talks about this in Getting Things Done, and what most people have on their plates are lots of amorphous blobs of stuff, not actionable items. So the first step is to break up big blobs into little actions, then take the first action.
Another thing Allen says when most people say they don't have enough time, its not really time its how they use/don't use it that matters.
If you're willing to accept the above as true and act on that information, things will get better.
He's also got some ideas about meetings that are similar to what Randy Pausch said not in the last lecture, but his lecture on time management. Pausch didn't go to meetings if there wasn't an agenda prepared. Allen always asks for next steps 15 minutes before the meeting is over because if no one is taking action to fix the problem you'll have the same meeting over and over until someone does.
I'm sorry, but where exactly does the rage part come in? There's a lot of work to do, people get lazy, skip it, and submit things without properly checking everything they should. That's laziness, apathy, or simply being bad at their job. If there was any rage, I imagine that things would be smashed and people would drop kick printers, possibly to rap music.
Wait a second, this isn't some lame attempt to have a "road rage" analogy in an office environment is it? That's just a sad attempt at crafting buzz-words, and you should feel bad for it.
No, Sir. It is my professional opinion that you have a touch of the "Information Rage." Take 2TB and post back in the morning.
Personally, I do the opposite; I encourage emails and discourage phone and walk-ins. With email, you can safely disregard it for a while and get back to it later, but not so much the other two methods. I've been at my new job since April and have yet to connect to the voicemail system and initialize my box. I'm that frickin' serious about not taking phone calls. Wait... Am I crazy here?
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...
Paralysis by analysis is what we always called it. You can't get anything done because you have to large amount of information about every decision available to decide and even if you can you want to wait for more data in hopes making a better decision. Eventfully you just end up feeling impotent because nothing is happening; next you just start doing stuff without considering any information just to see something actually happen.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Too much information? Get a better tool to handle it.
Not in digital formats? Hire data-entry folks at minimum wage.
Can't find the information you want in the sea of other information? Hire a librarian!
Librarians don't just deal with books anymore. They're highly-trained specialists in the field of information organization and retrieval. Conveniently, thanks to budget cuts and changing usage, there are a LOT of librarians looking for jobs right now, and they'll take relatively-cheap salaries, too. Large companies can't afford not to have a librarian.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
What the fuck does that mean?
... welcome our new Information Overloads.
accountant with horn-rimmed glasses. He didn't know how many pull-ups he could do because he had never done any.
He was overwhelmed with the deluge of information.
When he couldn't keep it in his cubicle any longer, he starting taking off his glasses on off-work hours, and resorted to drive-by Firesheeping, destruction of any and all HP printers flashing PC LOAD LETTER, and MITM attacks for kicks.
He was Info-Man.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I do the same since e-mail is documentation (CYA) and it's much easier to prioritize. My office phone went on the fritz more than a week ago and I really don't care when it's fixed.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Back when I worked at Boeing (before desktop PCs), one of my mentors always had a pile of paper in his in-basket that often exceeded a height of one foot. I asked him how he dealt with all that crap. His answer: If someone calls about some subject covered by a memo, he'd dig it out of the pile. After dealing with it, it would go on top. Once a week, he'd grab a hand full of paper off the bottom of the pile and throw it away.
A kind of bubble sort algorithm, I guess.
Have gnu, will travel.
You're not crazy at all.
Email is abused and not used correctly for its purpose. Most projects I have worked on in the last couple of years use planning software and web interfaces to collaborate. This way, the project is broken down into manageable sections and assigned to very specific groups. All of the documentation and materials is posted to these sections and anybody can view the modifications and add or edit them. Notes, comments, etc. can be added to action items and we can see at a glance the status of any specific task.
Email cannot do this. You end up with a clusterfuck of email messages from people that can be unrelated to your specific task and multiple versions of documentation that you need to track down in 200 attachments. You need to communicate with that one vendor? Search through 5,000 emails to find his email address instead of looking through a contact list in the project management software. Email just does not make sense.
I don't experience this anymore. People that are not used to it and start the email overload with me usually get handled pretty quickly and are admonished that email is not an acceptable form of professional communication for our projects. Even the management gets onboard pretty quick because they like it more than email too. Probably something about people responding directly to their task or trouble ticket with timestamps and notes.
On the other hand I see my co-workers more worried about their fantasy sports teams than whether they've tested the latest patches before deploying them.
Seriously.
The good people ARE over-worked and over-scheduled even when they correctly manage their time.
The not-so-good people are ALSO over-worked and over-scheduled because they chose different priorities.
But how do you distinguish between the two groups from the outside? I mean, other than "which people call on which people when their projects explode".