Too Much Information Worse Than Marijuana?

It looks like we are paying a pretty high price for connectivity. Read this and let me know if this worries any of you, especially since what's described here sounds like my typical day at work.

From Yankelovich MONITOR, 8/8/08

Information and instant communication are considered key elements of business success. As a consequence, many workers spend significant amounts of time keeping connected. RescueTime, an Internet-based management tool that documents how time is spent online, tracked the computers of 40,000 office workers and found that the average information executive opting into its service clicks to his or her email program more than 50 times, uses an instant-messaging service 77 times and surfs more than 40 Web sites in the typical day(2). What many of these workers don’t realize is the price they are paying to maintain this level of connectivity. One study by the University of London found that workers distracted by email and phone calls show a 10-point drop in IQ(3), a decline worse than that caused by smoking marijuana. Another study by the University of California at Irvine showed that workers took an average of 25 minutes to recover from typical interruptions such as emails or phone calls before returning to their original project(3).

In the face of such distraction—and a decrease in annual worker productivity from 4.1% in 2002 to 1.6% in 2007(4)—it's no wonder that companies such as Google, Microsoft, Intel and Xerox have joined together to form the Information Overload Resource Group(5). The nonprofit organization, which held its inaugural conference on July 15, has the goal of building awareness of “the world’s greatest challenge to productivity” and to “help make the business case for fighting information overload.”