Report: Info overload costs $900 billion, blame Mr. Rogers

If you're reading this at work, one research company says you're part of a $ …

Between checking your Twitter feed, responding to an IM from an old college friend, and reading frivolous articles at tech news sites, you're already less productive than you could have been today. But how much does such behavior actually cost your company, or the economy as a whole? One consulting firm thinks it has the unsettling answer: about $900 billion annually.  

Basex, a New York–based research company, has been studying the problem of "information overload" for years. In a 2005 study, through intensive interviews with and monitoring of knowledge workers, it produced the headline-grabbing estimate that unnecessary interruptions and distractions, and the time needed to get focused on work again, eat up 28 percent of an average workday, to which they assigned a current dollar value of some $650 billion for the US economy as a whole.

Now, in an ongoing study, Basex seeks to gauge the total loss from "information overload"—which includes all the other ways the problem of sifting through an ever-expanding universe of data eats time. According to CEO Jonathan Spira, in addition to that 28 percent lost to interruptions, information workers spend 15 percent of the day searching, 20 percent in meetings, and only 25 percent on "productive content creation."

To dramatize those findings, Basex has produced an "Information Overload Calculator" that draws on its own calculations, combined with industry salary averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to provide a ballpark estimate of "overload" costs at your own company.

Of course, Basex makes its money selling solutions to the problem it's diagnosing. So, like the exterminator's assessment of the scale of your rodent problem, it's probably worth taking with a grain of salt. The estimates use time as a proxy for output, and if the baseline is a Platonic ideal worker doing frictionless information sifting, any real-world firm will have ineradicable "costs" of this kind. But Basex estimates also don't seem wildly out of sync with other recent research placing the cost for an information-intensive 50,000 employee firm at about $1 billion annually.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the firm finds that fresh-faced young workers who suckled at a fiber optic teat and speak SMS as a second language are no less susceptible to the problem. "We recognize that as younger workers come into the workforce, they are more handy with technologies, they're more comfortable using them," says Spira, "but that doesn't mean they use them any more intelligently." 

So where are the costs coming from? In large part from those ever-proliferating distractions. Earlier studies suggested that these are more costly than they might at first blush appear, because the refractory period—the time it takes to recover your concentration after a distraction—can be 10 to 20 times the time lost to the interruption itself. (This does seem unlikely to be linear in scale, though, which may be a reason to cluster your distractions.)

Another big time sink, says Spira, comes from the need to sort through reams of data to find the particular piece of information a worker needs. He claims that about half of web searches fail—other estimates put the figure closer to 30 percent—and that almost half of what those users regard as successful are really partial failures, because the information recovered is outdated or inaccurate.

Part of the solution, Spira argues, is better search algorithms. "Most search is done now by keyword," says Spira, "and that's a terrible way of searching—by itself. It's not terrible when it's done in conjunction with taxonomies. But if I can't narrow down my search, how does the search engine know what my goal is?"

The problem is compounded when the results of the search are ranked by popularity, because "a popular result is very different from a correct result."

A less obvious culprit is Fred Rogers. "Mister Rogers told us we're all special growing up," says Spira. "So everything I have, because I'm so bloody special, is urgent and important, and clearly trumps whatever you might be working on, so I have no compunction about interrupting you."

Companies may be able to save a few bucks by encouraging employees to resist the impulse to "reply all"—or by encouraging recipients to prioritize e-mails in inverse relation to the number of names on the CC line. They could also try insulting their workers to destroy that sense of "specialness," but we suspect that would have other adverse consequences on productivity.

It may not be possible to eliminate information overload, but if one thing is certain, it's that... sorry, I just need to check my Facebook feed...

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