Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Information Overload, Interruptions in Flow - Reduce Productivity

In "3-Minute e-Learning" I focused on the need to present to learners content that is critical to their performance. This is necessary because of the frequent interruptions and preferences of learners to randomly move around whenever they are in online learning.

Email Dashboard focuses on the problems and solutions to information overload, interruptions, and related issues. (Information Overload - WikiPedia).

An interesting quote from Bryan Dollery:


"Flow takes time to achieve, and it is fragile. If a programmer's flow is interrupted it can take a large amount of time for her to regain the state, sometimes up to an hour. That's an hour of lost productivity to your team. If a programmer is interrupted many times during the day she may never reach this state. Without this state, creativity is crippled."

With the abundance of technology and massive growth of information, we need to avoid loss of focus and attention.

Three suggestions:
1. Focus on the task at hand to get optimal results and creativity.
2. Ask if this is the most productive use of one's time?
3. Manage information critically: What is valuable and useful in this content or knowledge? What areas must I master to avoid devastating errors? What areas are ambiguous? What are hard to learn and apply?

Related: Over-rated - The Myth of Multitasking