Let the Dataset Change the Mindset. I was born and raised in California, but there has never been a time when I haven’t felt, in the deepest part of the very core of my being, that I was made for New York City. When the stars aligned and life finally permitted a visit, everything between touching down at LaGuardia and my last evening in Midtown was exactly how I always dreamed it would be: like coming home. So maybe you can imagine the mixture of joy, pressure, and sheer anxiety I felt after being asked to write an article about two Con Edison employees, and how they used information design to help rebuild Manhattan after September 11th. “Find the story, Chelsi,” urged my team. Find the story. So here we go. Manhattan, I Love You After a chat with another Con Edison employee, Systems Specialist David Hill, it was decided that a mind map was in order. Information, You Are Beautiful Getting lost in information is easier with each passing day, so yeah, maps make a lot of sense.
Below is a visualization of the political spectrum. Help! We’re drowning: Coping with information overload. Last month, we conducted some research in association with One Poll, which found that British workers are finding it hard to navigate, organise and digest all of the information they have to deal with each day. The research highlighted that Brits seem to receive smaller amounts of data than we initially thought, however when it comes from multiple sources it quickly becomes hard to manage, something that can negatively impact the business bottom line and is making workers unhappy. Despite the average person receiving just 36 emails a day, our research found that a third of these are still going unread. Further results from the survey can be seen in our infographic, and seem to echo our email consumption, showing that data, even by the droplet, still maintains a negative human impact, and was cited as a cause of workplace unhappiness, with two thirds (65.%) of office workers saying that the amount of data they are receiving negatively affects their job.
Related. Pretty pictures: Can images stop data overload? 16 April 2012Last updated at 19:01 ET By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News Brain scan: Research suggests that one way to avoid being overloaded by data is by presenting it visually rather than text or numbers Sitting at your desk in the middle of the day, yet another email notification pops up in the corner of the screen, covering the figures you're trying to digest in the complicated spreadsheet in front of you. Your laptop is open on the desk next to you with another set of figures you need - meanwhile you're frantically tabbing through different documents on the main screen. You have a meeting in 20 minutes and you suddenly feel as if you're swimming in a sea of impenetrable data, and you're starting to sink. Welcome to the 21st Century workplace, and "data overload".
Under siege You're not alone. Dr Lynda Shaw is a neuroscience and psychology lecturer at Brunel University in the west of London. "When we feel overwhelmed we start to delay making decisions. " “Start Quote. Drowning in Data? Drowning in Data? In today’s working environment we have to deal with receiving information from many different sources, in multiple formats, which we are struggling to manage, digest and navigate the information to get to what is relevant. Something as simple as searching for information can waste a lot of time and have a big effect on our own productivity, and in turn can affect performance and job satisfaction. We decided to conduct some research into this issue of information overload, with the aim of quantifying how much of a problem this is proving for office workers and consequently businesses today.
Our survey was conducted by One Poll to office workers across the UK, Sweden and Holland, and asked a series of questions to find out how much information we receive on a daily basis and from which sources. View our infographic of UK results Calculate your own Data Mass Index Related. Overwhelmed? Get More Productive Now! The Information Diet. Today, we’re facing more information than ever before and we’re consuming more of it than ever too. (According to the NY Times, the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of information a day!) Yet despite this abundance of information, today’s employees are no more productive than their 20th century counterparts.
For those of you who unfamiliar with the idea of information overload, it was coined by the futurist Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. According to Wikipedia, information overload “refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information”. Today, information overload has become a hotly contested topic.
Employees are consuming more information than ever before, resulting in a crippling of decision making and more importantly costing companies in the US $650 billion dollars a year. Still not convinced that this is a problem? How do we help stop info overload? Your Turn. Data-WEB-01.jpg (1191×842)