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More and more we are starting to see the negative effects of information-overload, and it’s literally making us sick. According to research done by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) organization, information overload really does lead to stress-induced illness.

“The HSE stated that in 2004-2005 each case of stress-related ill health led to an average of 30.9 working days lost, and almost 13 million working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety.”

Tell us how information-overload is affecting you in the workplace.

Is easy access to abundant information a good thing? Are we smarter because of it? Does all this new information make us more productive and effective in our jobs?

It is becoming more and more apparent that over-abundant information – information overload – is hampering workers’ effectiveness at the workplace.

According to a recent LexisNexis workplace survey: “Seven out of 10 office workers in the United States feel overwhelmed by information in the workplace, and more than two in five say they are headed for a data breaking point.”

Here are some great tidbits from a recent MSNBC article, “How to dig out from the information avalanche” (http://tinyurl.com/yrkane):

We are on the brink of information insanity because of the following:

Ø Exponential growth of information “haystack”

Ø Ubiquity and immediacy of digital communications

Ø Lack of sufficient tools to help keep pace with growing information burden

Key findings from the LexisNexis survey mentioned above:

1. 62 percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need; 68 percent wish they could spend less time organizing information and more time using the information that comes their way.
2. Workers admit that not being able to lay their hands on the right information at the right time impedes their ability to work efficiently; 85 percent agree that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a huge time-waster.
3. More than 40 percent of the survey participants indicate an inability to handle future increases in information flow.
4. While an average workday for white-collar workers is 8.89 hours, the survey finds that on average, 7.89 working hours are used conducting research, attending meetings, and searching for previously created documents.
5. White-collar professionals spend an average of 2.3 hours daily conducting online research, with one in 10 professionals spending four hours or more on an average day.

Who’s going to save the world from the global information meltdown? Maybe Google, since their stated objective is to “organize the world’s information”?

I, for one, don’t think so. Google, once part of the solution now appears to be one of the biggest contributors to the problem. We can simply type in a couple words and then spend 2 days reviewing 10 million hits on “relevant” articles. Yeah, that’s an effective use of our time.

What do you think of information-overload? What’s the solution to this massive problem? How can we harness, manage and use all of this available information without it overwhelming us?

Send me your stories about information overload and how it affects your work or the work of colleagues and friends. I’ll post them here.

Also, have you found any remedies or strategies for dealing with information overload and how to deal with it? I’d like to know, so please pass them on, too.