Overload leads to Waste

Here are various proclamations about wasted time, resources, and days; sad if even half true!

* Americans waste 9 million hours per day searching for misplaced items.
* The average adult spends 16 hours a year searching for lost keys.
* 80% of the items we file, we never look at again
* The average person spends 8 months of their life reading junk mail.
* 90 million trees are consumed each year to provide paper for junk mail.

Paperless Office, Where are You?

Interesting insights contained on http://www.mindjack.com/:

“Tiffany Wilken in her essay on the myth of the paperless office reiterates, ‘paper usage seems to be increasing, rather than decreasing. What gives?’ Though we take advantage of digital technology for info-searchs, email, chats, and games, we don't quite trust it. We've all been burned by our computers at one time or another. In the back of our minds is the haunting doubt, ‘What if my computer crashes and I lose all my files?’ A hardcopy back-up still feels safer than something on hard-disk.

“The major obstacle to reaching the paperless office may be sociotechnical, according to a report funded by the Electronic Document Systems Foundation. People like the smell of opening a book. We may simply prefer paper…” !

Death by Powerpoint

What audiences find irritating about Powerpoint:

speaker read the slides 60%

text too small to read 51%

text too wordy 48%

poor slide color choices 37%

moving text or graphics 25%

irritating sounds 22%

complex charts 22%

The Importance of Being Concise

Here’s a good article by Dr. Donald Wetmore on the importance of being concise in our communications. In a nutshell, appropriate “concision” benefits all parties!

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.