Information Overload: Too much is too much

Do you ever watch an episode of Mad Men and get jealous? No, I’m not talking about the mid-day drinking or the afternoon naps, I’m talking about the amount of input we have now compared with what our parents, and our grandparents were expected to take in at the office. Every modern worker suffers from information overload. We check our email, our DropBox, our Google Drive, etc. Then, we’re supposed to tweet about it!? Sometimes it all feels like way too much.

Just this morning while I was knocking out a million burpees, a fellow boot camp goer asked me what I do for a living. I proceeded to tell her my job role, which includes managing social media. That’s when the questions started rolling in.

“What’s Google+?! Once I start using Facebook, my friends then told me to tweet, then I started tweeting but now they’re telling me to ‘Instagram it’. I don’t know what any of that means. Help!”

She was overwhelmed, but once I told her about Hootsuite, a place she can go to consolidate all of those channels into one swift action, she was impressed and relieved. She now knows that there is one place she can go to automatically schedule posts, tweets, and pictures to send at once. She doesn’t have to log in to multiple channels to get her point across.

Now, if only there was such a thing for enterprise organizations who aren’t interested in social media but rather sharing the knowledge needed to get work done. Thankfully, there is Bloomfire, an application to simplify knowledge management. Bloomfire consolidates information that before was buried in email, shared drives, and on desktops. It’s a place where important files, web links, questions, and answers can be shared and easily located when needed.

Sharing the same information and asking the same questions over and over again in email is a huge waste of time. Employees spend 30% of their workweek managing their email. Stop searching through hundreds, in many cases tens of thousands, of emails. Instead, put important information in a knowledge base where it can be easily found when needed. Use emails for private conversations, and to share information that won’t be needed by others in the organization later.

Get away from creating content in multiple places and then finding more places to distribute that content . Instead, find a knowledge base that is capable of content creation and file sharing, and also includes sophisticated search functionality. This way, you aren’t creating the content, then sharing the content, then notifying whoever would be interested about the content. Instead, you create the content, hit publish, and make it available to everyone who might need it now, or in the future.

The key to productivity and efficiency is finding the right tool for your organization that encompasses all the things you need to do your job.  The right knowledge base tool will let you communicate, create content, upload files, and have a robust Q&A feature. It will be a one-stop knowledge-shop. Instead of logging into several different channels, you will have a centralized knowledge hub to share content.