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Drew B points to an interesting article in the New York Times which tells the story of how some of the world’s largest technology firms are working together to help combat information overload. Microsoft, Google, Intel and IBM have joined forces to form a not-for-profit organisation which aims to “study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers - theirs and others - cope with the digital deluge.”

Dealing with information overload isn’t a new phenomenon. I constantly read people’s blog posts or tweets declaring “email bankruptcy”. David Brain touched on the subject this time last year and discussed the amount of inputs he receives during the work week. His conclusion is spot on: “…if you are in PR the ability to be able to switch from ‘input and scanning’ mode to ‘focus and doing’ mode is an increasingly important skill.”

This skill is becoming harder to do. Each day we’re presented with numerous distractions in the form of emails, RSS feeds, newspaper/magazine articles, tweets, TV programmes, Facebook notifications, YouTube videos, instant messages, text messages, phone calls, meetings and countless other forms of communication. A Blackberry isn’t nicknamed a Crackberry for no reason.

The wealth of information that is presented to us on any given day is often overwhelming. According to the video, Shift Happens (see below), it’s estimated that a week’s read of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

The easy solution would be to just ignore it all. Unsubscribe from all your feeds; don’t log into your instant message account; stop reading and writing tweets; cancel your Facebook account etc etc. But that would be a foolish step to take for those of us working in the Knowledge Economy. Although it is distracting, the information available is invaluable from a personal knowledge perspective to a wider business strategy and ‘moving-forward’ point of view.

In the realm of social media we’re also dealing with relationships. I now know hundreds of people from around the world who I would never have met or corresponded with because of it. This is great and is globalisation at is finest. But it’s not sustainable. It’s been proven that one person is limited to the number of relationships he or she can sustain. Sorry, but you don’t have 800 “friends” even if your Facebook profile says otherwise.

And therein lies the rub.

The topic of managing relationships is worthy of a blog post itself… No, make that a 200-page book, so I won’t try to tackle it here. I wouldn’t know how to anyway. Likewise, I wish I had a ‘10 Step Guide to Tackling Information Overload’ blog post for you, but I don’t. Being able to sort the wheat from the chaff (so to speak) in the knowledge economy is a arduous task and one that takes time, effort, skill and, perhaps most importantly, self-discipline.

Let’s hope Microsoft, Google, Intel and IBM can help us out a bit on this one.