Very familiar for me this week - apart from the "highly-paid" bit of course :)

Being on the road makes it hard to keep up with the weight of email and other information I receive. I was thinking about this yesterday when chatting with Nicky and driving down the M6 through Stafford. Our country's car "highways" were never designed to deal with the amount of traffic they take on a daily basis in much the same way humans don't appear to have been designed to deal with the vast influx of information we have on a daily basis. Even with my new found love of RSS as my way of dealing all the stuff I want to read on the web, and feeding in to Outlook as my aggregator, I still have too much. I don't even get near the dead tree type of information stuff I used to consume so much of. That lies dormant on my coffee table waiting for the moment that my Internet connection goes down. Even then I have so many ways to get hooked up to my umbilical cord of connectivity that it will probably decompose and return to it's former state before I get to it :)

Not convinced? A recent study showed that 56 percent of workers are overwhelmed by multiple simultaneous projects and interrupted too often; one-third say that multi-tasking and distractions are keeping them from stepping back to process and reflect on the work they're doing. In the UK specifically, it's estimated that stress accounts for nearly one-third of absenteeism and sick leave. Bad eh?

I personally need to work on my information strategy. Outlook is helping with search, rules and categorization and when we get the Exchange voice access features (aka unified communications) that come in Exchange Server 2007 things will take a huge leap forward as I'll be able to talk to email. Sounds geeky I know and it is a bit weird but the demo James gives of this really shows the impact. I can literally call my server and say "delete all the boring stuff". Almost.

Ultimately I suspect we all need to get better an dealing with information overload though at work and at home. Our society is becoming so information rich that traditional channels of distribution (papers, the church, television and more) are being challenged as people turn to the web, mobile devices and elsewhere for their information needs.

How long until we see a class in school that teaches how to make the most of our info rich but time poor society?