Let’s face it; ‘Information Overload’ has been a headline issue for ‘Knowledge Workers’ for at least 10 years. It’s no longer ‘News’ it is just a Fact. So! What to do with this fact of life? I’m going to highlight a few pointers on email management and task / workload management here and will highlight other ‘Social Media’ communication management aspects in a later blog.

I am very interested in your thoughts and experiences around this. What do you think? Drop me a comment below. As with all workload management issues there are the human elements and the technology elements to master. It’s a big area and clearly I believe that the best thing anybody could do is to book us to bring our proven support to them, their team and their company – and I’m always looking to do just that! So, whilst reading this, think about it and get in touch

The wonderful thing about the human side of managing focus, energy and priorities within a demanding workload is that one size fits nobody. We all approach this stuff with our own particular strengths, weaknesses, baggage and vision. That, by the way, is why we place such a high importance on the pre and post training support we provide people whom we train. It also probably explains why we help people get the results they do get from our support.

Human aspects of focus management and filter failure

There are obviously very many and I would just highlight 3 previous blogs that I think are important to look at through the prism of ‘Filter Failure’. These are:
1) The impact of Continuous Partial Attention and Multitasking. They are not the same!
2) The paradox of  choice: More is less – we need to be careful about this!
3) The business demands around speed of response / reaction to emailwhich can enslave people to their inboxes, contributing to stress at work .

Technology aspects of focus management and filter failure

No technology is perfect, and certainly, no technology will do our focusing and filtering for us on its own! If you are using Microsoft Outlook then you might find these 2 earlier blogs useful  to look at through the prism of ‘Filter Failure’:

1) How to create Outlook rules to control the email deluge.
2) How to turn off the Pavlovian Outlook alerts and alarms

There it is, over to you, let me have your thoughts below. I will blog on the social-media overload and filter failure shortly.