How can you avoid information overload?

The response below is specific to email overload, although the same concepts apply to other types of information overload as well.

Employees are spending larger and larger portions of their day processing email. In many cases, business users receive 100 (or more) messages a day, and can spend 2 to 3 hours a day on email related activities. Research has identified negative impacts from the constant interruptions of processing high volumes of email, including professional and personal stress. Work also has been found to become "fragmented", resulting in lower productivity, errors, omissions, and reduced decision making abilities. For email, the key strategies to deal with email overload fall into three broad groups: organizational, technological, and behavioral.

Organizational approaches to reducing email overload incorporate the use of corporate guidelines or acceptable use policies as a way to set organizational-wide rules around the appropriate, and inappropriate, use of email. These approaches are also referred to as "email etiquette" or "netiquette", and focus on teaching people to "use email more appropriately". These can run the range from being enforced as formalized policies and procedures, communicated as suggested guidelines, or expressed as cultural norms of expected behavior within the organization. Organizational approaches are an important component to helping to manage email use within the organization. They set a common set of values, expectations, and behaviors around the use of email, reducing the email overload burden for everyone.

Technological approaches to reducing email overload leverage specific features and functionality in the email system itself as ways to reduce email overload. This approach has traditionally been the primary focus area for most email training programs. The goal is on improving an individual's fluency in the email system and making people "use email more efficiently". Research has found that there is often little formalized training on the use of email, as most people are presumed to already be email proficient. Yet most email users, even those that deem themselves "email savvy", are only familiar with a small fraction of their email system's features and capabilities. A technological approach which utilizes targeted feature training can yield significant improvements in email skills, which can result in large reductions in email overload.

Behavioral approaches to reducing email overload focus on improving the knowledge, actions, and behavior of the individual senders and recipients. These approaches incorporate the areas of media competencies and email triage, and focus on teaching people to "use email more effectively". Media competencies include topics such as when email is an appropriate (and inappropriate) form of communication, how to build high-quality email subject lines and message bodies, and understanding and reducing the negative impacts of constant email distractions. Email triage (workflow) encompasses the difficult yet important area of improving skills in how to manage your daily in-box volumes, including how to scan, analyze, prioritize, organize, and file your messages. Behavioral approaches, the way you interact with, and react to email, are yet another critical component to improving email skills and reducing your email overload.

Research has found that in order to make the greatest improvements in your email skills and the largest reduction in your email overload, you must focus on elements in all three areas (Organizational, Technological, and Behavioral) in order to be truly successful. In addition, email research has found that here is likely no single effective email processing strategy, and that email training needs to stress a diversity of skills and approaches to meet individual styles. Yet, the solution isn't to simply blame the media as the source of the issue.

There was a time (not so long ago) when the telephone was the primary source of communications. You would come into the office in the morning, seeing the "dreaded blinking voicemail light" on the phone, and then listen to how many voicemail messages had accumulated since you had left at the end of the prior day. Similar "overload" issues were experienced with telephone communication, including excessive time spent on phone calls, frequent checking of voicemails (including in the evenings, weekends, and vacations), the infamous "voicemail phone tag game" (i.e: "returning your message... call me... tag.. your it.."), and even exceeding your voicemail account limitations so you could not be left a new message.

Look back and we can identify similar issues for other communication methods such as fax machines (with its communication failures and "lost pages"), pagers (remember those?), and even formal letters that had to be written, proofed, and delivered (often by expensive, overnight delivery). And now, we are seeing similar challenges with managing communications through the vast array of social media networks (twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).

The issue isn't email itself, but rather on teaching individuals and organizations how to use the "right type of media" for the "right types of situations", and investing the organizational resources in providing the training to help improve an individual's knowledge, skills and fluency across all the available media types.