The overload statistics on you and your organisation

I use Evernote for storing a large amount of my reference material, and am a big fan. I was recently invited to one of their seminars. The title of this one being Triple Overload. Just seeing the word “Overload” had me signing up.

To sum up the talk, they were saying that the 3 overload situations are:

1.     Data – We waste on average 2.5 hours a day searching for information. It’s only going to get more difficult as the amount of data in the world doubles every 14 months, and in a number of years it will be doubling every hour!

2.     Communication – As knowledge workers, we spend 80% of our working time in meetings and email/IM/Social Media. i.e communicating and collaborating. Therefore there’s only a small amount of time to do some focused thinking and deep work, which is usually the time that we add the real value.

3.     Cognitive – At least every 3-5 minutes we are being interrupted, be it from others, or from interrupting ourselves by switching tasks, which stops our flow and productivity and leads to exhaustion.

There are some really big stats in there, and the first one especially intrigues me. 2.5 hours a day on searching, that’s a hefty chunk of time. That’s about a third of your standard working day.

I’d be interested to know what workers do with the other 20% for their day at work, do they manage to do the deep work, like getting that report/proposal done, or do they spend it recovering from the overload?

One thing is for sure, with all of these issues not going away any time soon, and the work I’m doing in organisations is increasing in importance.