Every morning hundreds of men go through crises in confidence as their cerebral levels are pushed to the brink trying to comprehend and absorb vast overloads of data and more data, much less information in many cases. We are inundated with huge reports to be read, massive proposals to be reviewed, seemingly unending product information documents, chunky files taunting our senses.

Surging waters

In the broadest of terms, the information overload happens in two ways. At any point, especially with respect to an ongoing project, customer, contract obligation, campaign etc., one is expected to remember the vaguest of nitty-gritty like sending a clarification fax or buying pens for the conference. The information typically arrives as a sequence of disjointed blips making it too trivial to note down and too minor to remember!

But the biggest of crises come for executives wanting to make themselves continually updated in order to try and combat the pressures of corporate rat race. Nowhere is it felt more than in the IT industry. Everyday, regardless of our job profile, we are swamped by information on new products with their upgraded features, huge data to be read and analyzed as part of our job, new technologies which bounces overhead, competition information, the works.

Duel with the microchip

In a nutshell, an average executive of today is expected to read, process, store and recall (doesn’t all this look alarmingly like a microprocessor’s clock-cycle actions?) information pertaining to his/her environment as well as company. Within the company, we have streams of information coming about company, industrial policies, products and customers. And let’s not even talk about wanting to refurbish one’s general awareness on the economy and may be, even politics!

The average villager today might be steeped in poverty or may not be having the fanciest of gizmos, but his peace of mind is much more assured since he needs to process far less information than any city-bred student or corporate individual. As one of my favorite quote goes “The more we learn, the less we know” since what we learned earlier has been submerged in a quagmire of new learning!

In this information madness, a major aspect that has got sidetracked in the debate is the non-availability of time to practice skills learned through textual or online means. Earlier, companies had their new recruits go through a formal (and sometimes even regimented!) induction programs which were followed by a probation period. The probation time, as the word goes, does mean a trial period for the employee in the company so that he acquires the basic skills required for performing his duties within the 6-12 month period. With the current levels of attrition in the corporate world, the equations are getting changed regarding giving employees time to learn.

Earlier the sources were limited, infrequent and slow to come by. The Internet and the web has blown away this paradigm by blitzing you with gigabytes more of information from all over the planet even before you have read through the first page. Regular web-browsers would be acutely aware of the problem of searching for some pertinent information only to find that there are over a million sites all claiming to be the rightful provider of what has been asked. Once you sift through them, you would be doubtlessly enriched on your knowledge levels about the topic presuming you do not give much heed to your other pressing job responsibilities.

Ultimately, we have ended up equating and trying to match the computer’s capabilities in large volume storage and retrieval putting unwarranted performance pressures on human brain.

Where is the panacea?

While no one in his right frame of mind can vouch for an elixir to combat the information menace, it would be worthwhile to remember certain home truths in this regard.

Firstly, we need to learn the art of being ruthlessly selective about the data and information that rushes us. The ideal thing, as one former colleague of mine reminded me, would be to step back and allow news coming our way to run forward waiting for some curious onlooker to pick it up.

A second aspect is to look at issues where one needs to focus and where one needs to be just aware. General awareness is well and good, but we should learn to draw the line when we realize that we are probing further into territories we don’t really need to plough. The ideal thing in this case is to build superficial knowledge on a variety of topics so that you don’t end up looking foolish if you are say, an IT person and some wise guy throws up jargon like workflow-centric management or data object modeler. On the other hand, for your primary job responsibility and industry, depth of knowledge is called for. To quote the much-abused term, these are really the times of the knowledge worker.

And finally, it is worth reiterating the old management cliché at this juncture. One needs to identify what is important and what is urgent. For the diagrammatically oriented, you can end up with a box of four cells if you map important-unimportant with urgent and not-so-urgent! In any case, as we all know, urgent matters are time-critical and scream for your immediate attention. What is important is organization-critical and will have greater ramifications if you do not spend a greater deal of time on them.

A conscious practice of these rudimentary tips can go a long way in taming the information monster. Till then, it might make sense to carry out our line in the reverse so that “the less we learn, the more we shall know”!