It’s the story of our lives. So much to do, so little time. What options do we have to keep up with an increasing number of people and “things” demanding our attention?

Peter Bregman offers some good suggestions in this well articulated piece, posted back in May. How about saying no to activities that you don’t consider critically important? Or keeping an “ignore list”?

Here’s one of the key quotes from the article:

“… our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We’ll exhaust ourselves. We’ll get confused, nervous, and irritable.”

If you’d like to read the whole story, you can find it here.

On August 12th, Basex and the Information Overload Research Group organized the “Information Overload Awareness Day“. It was a day of “high-level interaction, knowledge sharing, and learning about the problem of Information Overload – all without leaving your office”.

Blog posts, comments and highlights from the event are now available. This post and this other post summarize the day in a few paragraphs. Here are some key points:

• We have created billions of pictures, documents, videos, podcasts, blog posts, and tweets, yet if these remain unmanaged it will be impossible for anyone to make sense out of any of this content because we have no mechanism to separate the important from the mundane
• Knowledge workers need to develop a far greater fluency and literacy in the use of e-mail, file management, managing images, and managing tasks.
• While most activity is around personal solutions, “what the world needs are organization-wide solutions.”

These days, when we talk about time management and productivity, the concept of information overload often comes up. It’s a problem (and opportunity) that many researchers, established businesses and startups have been exploring more aggressively in the last 3 years or so.

Here are two short videos about information overload that we’ve come across recently. The first one is from Xerox, a corporate member of the Information Overload Research Group, and a company that has been trying to bring more awareness to information overload in general:

The Xerox video has some good moments, but I find the characterization of the problem as a syndrome a bit clichéd.

The second video is from Basex, one of the research firms that has been studying the problem of information overload within organizations and analyzing data and testimonials.