Email Bankruptcy and Other Symptoms of Information Overload

Anyone who has given up on reading all the emails that arrive while on vacation, given up on reading all the blogs that other people recommend, and given up on keeping up with every new technology that comes out appreciates the concept of “information overload”.   Coping with the overload is the subject of the podcast “Managing Information Overload”, a Harvard Businss Ideacast interview with Paul Hemp.  Paul is the author of the Harvard Business Review article "Death by Information Overload”.   

It was during this interview that I learned of some of the techniques companies are experiementing with to control email overload such as disabling the "Reply to All" button and prioritizing the contents of email inbaskets according to a user rating point system which prevents users from arbitrarily declaring all their emails as "urgent".  I also heard the phrase "email bankruptcy" for the first time to describe people who simply give up on catching up on email and simply delete all email and start over.

Check out the podcast interview. Its episode 159 at Harvard Business IdeaCast or also on iTunes.