With hyperlinks leading you down myriad pathways, it is impossible to concentrate :-

If you are wondering what don’t-be-evil Google, the poster boy of employee-friendly practices, is up to these days, here’s the answer: it’s increasing childcare costs. Googlers are aghast at the hike — up to 70 per cent —even as the world’s leading Internet search company continues to tout its free gourmet cafeterias, pool tables and climbing walls.

That may have all the makings of a public relations disaster. And there could be more to come. The latest issue of The Atlantic has an article by Nicholas Carr, US writer on the impact of technology on culture, titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?

It’s well worth reading. Carr is not talking about Google alone; his ambit is the whole Internet. But Google, as the most popular gateway for data access, is representative.

Carr’s thesis is something that any regular Internet user will identify with. With hyperlinks leading you down myriad pathways, says Carr, concentration is impossible. This may be all very fine when you are on the Net, a medium meant for people with low bandwidths. But it is influencing your every day functioning too. Reading books, for instance, is fast becoming history.

“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” writes Carr. “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle… My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet ski.”

Carr is not saying this is necessarily bad. He thinks it is, but has an open mind. He says that that at Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California, the religion practised inside its walls is Taylorism. (Fredrick Taylor was one of the high priests of scientific measurement and mass production.) “What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind,” says Carr.

That is a debate worth following. What it has also done is to spark off an argument on information overload. What has the Net brought? On the one hand, you get taken down sundry byways. A person searching for, say, rabbits is likely to get diverted to dwarf rabbits and even verse such as “The rabbit has a charming face; / Its private life is a disgrace”. On the other hand, with all this information so easily accessible, you don’t need to remember it.

This is information in the public domain. Within companies, there is enterprise knowledge which, if the collection, cataloguing and cross-referencing has been good enough, is even more valuable. The executive assistant who was prized for his memory has been replaced by a laptop and even a Blackberry.

But even as information overload in terms of data you need to remember becomes a thing of the past, decisions need to be made faster. The report which would earlier take you three days to write is now needed in three hours. The overload — whether you call it information or work — remains. The solutions to such problems (see box) are the same.

As for Google and reading, one needn’t worry too much. Calculators should have killed off another R — arithmetic. But it hasn’t made much difference to our lives.

EMPTY-HEADED :-

How to manage information overload

Learn to let go: Weed out the unimportant. Scan your emails rather than read them in depth. And teach yourself to recognise what you need to devote time to and what you can discard.

Learn to say no: Decide whether meetings are really necessary. If you need to really concentrate on something, let your phone calls go to voicemail and don’t worry about offending people.

Do the most difficult thing first.

Never procrastinate. Clear your in tray and do what you say you’re going to do, every day.

Do one thing at a time. Take one piece of information, deal with it, file it and then move on.

Source: Adapted from Personneltoday.com, How to Avoid Information Overload

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