On Tuesday this week, the inaugural event of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) took place in New York City. ‘What is the IORG?’, you might ask:

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is “a group of industry practitioners, academic researchers, and consultants dedicated to reducing information overload, a problem which diminishes the productivity and quality of life of knowledge workers worldwide.”

The group was formed not too long ago by several researchers interested in the subject, and it has gained quite a bit of attention recently because of a New York Times cover story.

We took a trip up to Times Square to join several big and small companies such as IBM, Morgan Stanley, Seriosity and Basex to learn more about the problem of information overload and discuss possible solutions and best practices.

Most of the time, the discussion centered on email and interruptions, such as phone calls and IM requests. Not surprisingly, some of the numbers that came up in the presentations illustrated just how big the issue is. For example, an average executive at Morgan Stanley receives upwards of 500 emails a day. And according to Nathan Zelder at Intel, an average knowledge worker loses 6 hours per week when switching between tasks, the so-called “context-switch”.

From our experience here at Slife Labs, one of the difficulties that people have when they work in front of a computer all day is that when they hit a bump in their workflow, blogs, YouTube, games and much more are just a click away. Ten minutes here and there represent a big chunk of time at the end of the day and that leads to loss of productivity and frustration. I would argue that this is due to information overload as well, but these sorts of self-inflicted interruptions were not covered too much in the event.

Overall, a good gathering and we will continue to follow all the developments in this space very closely. For more details, quotes and numbers, you can check an extensive blog post from Jared Goralnick, who participated in the event and is working on an interesting email tool called AwayFind.

If you have any suggestions of how we can improve Slife to help you deal with the problem of information overload and productivity, let us know. Curious Slife Labs minds would like to know.