A NOTE TO THE READER

At the risk of potentially overloading you with information before you even start reading, I wanted to alert you to two important issues relating to this book.

First, while this book is bound and fixed in time and space, its mission is not limited to these pages. The book’s companion Web site, Overload Stories (www.OverloadStories.com), has been created in order to allow you to share your own experiences and stories about Information Overload and read what others are going through. You will also be able to review updated research and case studies and participate in a dialogue with me on these issues.

Second, I have written this book with the individual knowledge worker in mind. As a result, throughout the book, my references to the knowledge worker are in the singular tense and this requires a singular pronoun, such as he or she. (It is at this point that I am reminded of Mark Twain’s excellent essay, “The Awful German Language,” in which he points out that “a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female.”)

To avoid what would be a rather awkward repetition of “he or she” or “him or her” throughout the book and to maintain a modicum of consistency in pronoun usage, I treat the term “knowledge worker” as a masculine noun that requires a masculine pronoun (i.e., I refer to the individual knowledge worker as “he” or “him”). Of course, Information Overload impacts everyone without regard to gender; ...

Get Overload!: How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.