Category Archives: Information Overload

Want Innovation? Ditch the Radio

In last week’s New York Times Sunday Review section, there’s an interview with J. B. Straubel, founder of Tesla Motors, which makes electric vehicles.  According to the introduction, some people compare the companyto Apple in terms of “obsessive attention to design, intuitive user interface and expense.” Obviously, Mr. Straubel is a great thinker and innovator.
When…

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What Can We Learn from the National Day of Unplugging?

I was very interested when I heard about the National Day of Unplugging (sunset February 28  to sunset March 1).  Since conquering cyberoverload is all about becoming the master and not the slave of our gadgets, I thought I should give it a try. But it wasn’t the easiest day for me to try to…

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Must We Turn Off Our Kindles on the Plane?

Once you move to an e-reader, as I have, you’re bothered by the fact that you have to give it up for two relatively short periods of time—during airplane take-offs and landings. We’ve been told for years that anything with an on-off switch can interfere with the plane’s navigation system.
An article in the New York…

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Smartphones and Heart Attacks

Yesterday I  overheard a woman talking about her husband’s recent heart attack:
He came back from running feeling absolutely horrible, with tightness in his chest, but he thought it was just because of the cold air.  She said to him, “it may be a heart attack. Let’s go to the emergency room.” He absolutely refused, saying,…

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Listen to Me on WPR’s Larry Meiller Show

I talked about about conquering CyberOverload
on Wisconsin Public Radio (Wisconsin Ideas Network)
Listen to the show, in which I especially focus on helping businesses conquer cyberoverload.
It is archived here at 1/03/2013, 11:45 a.m.

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Save Four Hours of Your Workday by Managing Your Interruptions

Do you hear anyone complaining that they have too much time on their hands? Of course not. Everyone seems to have too much to do and not enough hours in the day to accomplish it — much less have time to relax.
The Incredible Cost of Interruptions
But recent research points to a solution: Stop letting yourself…

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Get a Grip on Email Overload

Is it just me, or is the monsoon of email rising like the earth’s oceans, ready to swamp you entirely if you don’t keep up every day? Give one political contribution and suddenly, every pol is your friend; join a professional organization and every related provider wants your business; and are there more and more…

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Mastering Your Multitasking

It’s been amply demonstrated that the brain can’t multitask its attention. Because working memory is so small, we can’t process two streams of thought at the same time. Our brains switch back and forth between the two tasks and when we do this, we lose time, energy, accuracy, and quality. As I referred to it…

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Tweeting at Your Meeting? Maybe Not!

My last post talked about some of the advantages of using Twitter in a meeting: Keeping the audience’s attention; speeding up feedback; spontaneity; and enabling shy audience members to participate.
But I’m not sure the plusses would outweigh the minuses in most situations.  I think it depends on what else is happening while the tweeting is…

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Go Ahead: Let Them Tweet at Your Meeting

No one knows better than I do the perils of having an audience use Twitter. I’ve been writing and speaking on the problem of digital distractions for years. The verdict is in on multitasking – we can’t do it; whenever we try to do two things at once, both tasks suffer, especially when both tasks involve…

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