2008: Year of Information Overload?

Interruptions aren't merely annoying; they're also bad forproductivity. And when you multiply the interruptions made possible byemail, phone calls, text messages, and Twitters across the entire US,the result is lost productivity on a massive scale: $650 billion in asingle year.
That's according to research firm Basex, which chose "informationoverload" as its 2008 "Problem of the Year." Failure to solve theproblem will lead to "reduced productivity and throttled innovation."The situation is dire enough that Intel's Nathan Zeldes estimates "theimpact of information overload on each knowledge worker at up to eighthours a week."
This is hardly a news flash, of course. Multitasking has long beenrecognized to have deleterious effects on productivity. The great ironyis that multitasking is meant to improve productivity, but the humanbrain turns out to be bad at rapid task switching. The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece on the false promise of multitaskingin its November edition (subscribers only), using as one of itsepigraphs a line by Publilius Syrus: "To do two things at once is to doneither."
Many Americans share this concern. In a 2007 Pew survey,49 percent of Americans described themselves as having "few techassets" and said that constant connectivity was an annoyance, not aliberation.
But young people don't seem to have (yet, anyway) developed the samesense 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 yearthat most junior high and high school students train themselves earlyin the dark arts of multitasking, with most listening to music orwatching TV while they read books or surf the Internet. 30 percent ofstudents even multitask while doing their homework.
Will these students feel the multitasking pinch when they grow up tobecome the new generation of "knowledge workers," or will constantexposure to interruptions make them more adept at handling the massivetorrent of information that flows through modern computers and cellphones? Or is the "do more things at once philosophy" simply a dead endthat produces only monstrosities, like the Internet-connectedrefrigerator 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 thebest strategy for completing long-term work, but it might get breakingitems out of the inbox faster. For companies that thrive on pumping outcutting-edge, timely information, information overload and itsattendant multitasking requirements could prove to be a competitivenecessity.