Press Releases

NEW YORK, May 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Drowning in a sea of information?  Now there's a book that chronicles our battle with Information Overload and offers ways to cope.

Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization (John Wiley & Sons, May 31, 2011), by award winning author and researcher Jonathan Spira, tells how Information Overload has infiltrated the workplace and our daily lives, and offers tips and strategies on how to deal with the dizzying excess of information, as well as multi-tasking and its disruptive and costly consequences.  The book includes a foreword by Esther Dyson, a prominent Internet entrepreneur, investor and authority on emerging technologies.

For organizations large and small, the deluge is fed by the hundreds of emails received and the numerous voicemails, texts, IMs, tweets, posts, and other communiques that head our way every day. The impact of this overload is a decline in productivity and the decimation of any semblance of work-life balance.  In short, Information Overload leaves us feeling as if there's no time left to get any work done.

"From endless email, social media, and texting, to poor search tools and a dramatic increase in information generation, Information Overload is exceeding the bandwidth of businesses and employees at unprecedented levels," said Mr. Spira, CEO and chief analyst of Basex, a research firm focusing on issues companies face as they navigate the knowledge economy.

In an entertaining but insightful manner, Mr. Spira helps define what Information Overload is, how our society has reached this point, and how we can break the cycle so that we can return to normalcy. The book is the culmination of more than ten years of research conducted by the author, who worked with some of the world's leading companies studying how we consume information and how information ultimately consumes us. This research demonstrates, among other things, that the U.S. economy suffers a one trillion dollar loss in productivity each year due to Information Overload.

Revealing how the very tools deployed to make knowledge workers more efficient have in turn bogged down productivity, Overload! explores the many ways today's tidal wave of information has bombarded and dulled our senses as well as hampered our ability to innovate and produce.

The book presents some staggering statistics that chronicle the time and money lost due to Information Overload:

• A minimum of 28 billion hours is lost each year to information overload in the United States.

• Reading and processing just 100 email messages can occupy over half of a knowledge worker's day.

• It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30-second interruption.

• For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an email, eight hours are lost.

• 58 percent of government workers spend half the workday filing, deleting, or sorting information, at a cost of almost $31 billion dollars annually.

Overload! provides details, tips and strategies that the world's leading organizations – including IBM, Intel, Morgan Stanley and the U.S. Air Force – have employed. The book's companion website – www.OverloadStories.com – provides a place for readers to detail their own battles and victories in the Information Overload war. Mr. Spira will also facilitate discussions on the site in addition to presenting case studies and research and expanding the ideas contained in the book.

Detailed information about Overload! is available at: www.overloadbook.com.

SOURCE Basex, Inc.