This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Information overload is so 1971

One of my masters students happened to dredge up a quote from Herbert Simon that nails the problem of information overload.  And then I have to laugh when I see that he was thinking about this back in 1971.  This from the description of Attention economy in Wikipedia:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon, 1971, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, p 40-41.).

The focus of the quote is on attention, but that is the problem of information overload - we lose the ability to focus our attention on those things that really need it.

Love the title of the book too!

And I see this isn't the first time this quote has opened my eyes.  I knew it sounded familiar!

Necessary But Not Sufficient, 2nd pass

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