A Quote Worth Pondering

"Technology reduces the amount of time it takes to do any one task but also leads to the expansion of tasks that people are expected to do." – Juliet Schor

Temptation Over the Top

More 23 million American workers may be fooling around on the jobs most of their day. They use company time to play on the computer, search for new jobs, and communicate with friends. Could it be that having too many information and communication sources at one’s fingertips is too great a temptation?

Letting Go of Excess

Consider your information intake vehicles and determine how you can pare down. On basic level, I suggest opening your mail over the waste basket; it's much easier to throw things
out with the waste basket below you.

If you receive a magazine or journal, go through it rapidly and take out the articles or items that look like they'll be of interest. Recycle the rest of the publication. Often, there's no need to hang on to the back issues of a publication. Much of the information is also on-line. In general pare down what you receive to only what you need -- reduce the volume as quickly and easily as possible.

Cyber Info Never Dies

It’s official: anything you ever email at work will be stored for evermore and, should the circumstance ever arise, will be used against you! AP business writer Christopher Rugaber, observes that “U.S. companies will need to know more about where they store e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees in the event they are sued, thanks to changes in federal rules that took effect Friday,” according to legal experts.

“The changes, approved by the Supreme Court's administrative arm in April after a five-year review, require companies and other parties involved in federal litigation to produce ‘electronically stored information’ as part of discovery, the process by which both sides share evidence before a trial.”

There you have it: if you write it and send it, your message will live on and on and on…

Bypassing Automated Malarky

How would you like to by-pass all the automated malarky we all endure when calling an organization and go right to a human operator? The “Gethuman 500 database” is your dream come true!

Blackberry = Freedom?

How telling! Fours year ago this observation appeared in Men's Health: “You rush out and buy a Blackberry thinking that you'll be able to email and phone people from wherever you happen to be. Suddenly, everywhere will be your office. Within about a week the reality sets in. You're fiddling with the thing all day long, including right before you go to bed. It would be a useful device if you'd turn it off at about 6 p.m. and didn't turn it on again until about 8 a.m., but that's never going to happen.”

Held Hostage by Info Overload

Here is a wonderful article titled, “We Have the Information You Want, But Getting It Will Cost You: Being Held Hostage by Information Overload” written by then doctoral student Mark Nelson.