Hey, Guys, haven’t some of us been saying this all along?

According to the New York Times, a group of major hi-tech corporations are getting together to fund a nonprofit group that will study information overload, publicize the problem and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with cellphone calls, e-mail and instant messages that destroy people’s attention spans and hurt their productivity (“Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast”).

I guess the message is finally getting through — ironically to the very businesses whose products most help cause the mess in the first place.

It seems that the typical IT person, sitting all day in front of the computer screen, “turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times.” It’s also estimated that “unnecessary interruptions” cost the US economy more that $650 billion each year.

According to the article:

Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.
     A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

This gadget turns the screen gray and tells whoever is sitting in front of it to, “Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack. We’ll be back in 15 minutes!”

All we need now is some software that recognizes when arrangments are being made for yet another pointless meeting and automatically replies, “Get lost, time-wasters! I’m doing some work even if you aren’t!”

I guess things will change now that some corporations have seen they can make money out of people without the commonsense and willpower to arreng their time without adding to all the daily distractions with more and more digital toys. Still, it pleases me to see that even corporate America can finally get the message that there can be such a thing as too much communication — especially when the content is mostly gossip and similar rubbish.

Still, I can’t resist saying, “I told you so!”

Technorati Tags: information overload, cellphone calls, e-mails, instant messages, wasting time at work, productivity