An article by Paul Hemp in Harvard business titled “What’s So Bad About Information Overload?” addresses an argument on why we should put up with the overload and what it gives us. He asks an employee of the Xerox Corporation about her biggest information overload source and she quickly responded, her email. He paints the picture of receiving numerous often uncountable emails a day and the futile attempts at responding to them, even only to people we know. He argues that although these things usually overwhelm us they also lend to our success by being tools, which in theory allow us to be more efficient and thus more successful. He concludes by saying we should just go with it and use it to the best of our abilities because creating success is the measuring stick of usefulness of anything. I politely disagree with his argument. First off using the emotional satisfaction of accomplishment relevant to societies expectations of you or success as a measuring stick is illogical. The standards for which success is judged are constantly changing, therefore anything measured by it would constantly be changing also. It follows that his argument can be completely useless once the definition of success changes say to maybe mastery of ones own domain versus monetary excess.
Do you consider increased monetary success and its associations as an acceptable trade of dealing with vast amount of information on a daily basis?
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