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I keep thinking that if I could just get more organized…get ahead of things a bit, I would have all the information I need and everything would be significantly easier.

My desk is overflowing even though I recently cleaned it. My desktop background is hidden behind an army of icons, digital post-its, shortcuts, gadgets and widgets even though I’ve deleted about 50% of them. This morning I had 250 new emails and that doesn’t include the ones that were designated as junk mail. Plus there’s about 50 I still need to answer from last week. I’ve set up news feeds to stay up to date and then aggregated my thousands of news feeds into one tidy package. I touch my snail mail only once and try to handle each piece of paper that comes across my desk efficiently.

I’ve done the things organizers suggest. But there’s still so much. So many gaps. So much I need and want to know and learn. And I keep thinking that if I can just find that one piece of information, that the dozens of ideas adrift in my brain would gel and kick start me into a feverish state of productivity and creativity. But it’s like the more I read and research, the less I know, and the more I feel I need to read and research. The sheer amount of information we have at our fingertips is exhilarating and paralyzing. And exhausting.

Which led me to a question about the rate of information growth compared to the past. In researching the subject, I typed “information overload” in Google and it showed over 2.6 million results. That alone was intimidating. But I clicked on a few and while looking around, I read about the striking difference between the industrial economy of the past and its issues of scarcity (think oil) and the digital economy and its glut of data. Consider these stats:

• A typical weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than a 17th century individual would have read in a lifetime.
• In the last 30 years we have produced more information than in the previous 5,000.
• The amount of recorded scientific knowledge is doubling approximately every fifteen years.
• There is enough scientific information written every year to keep a person busy reading day and night for 460 years.
• Over 1,000 books are published around the world every day.
• Every day there are 7 million new documents published on the Web, where there are already over 550 billion.
• The world produces between one and two exabytes of unique content per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. (I had to look it up…an exabyte = 1000⁶ )

I found one stat that said the “produced” information is increasing at a rate of 30% per year, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. If that stat is true, then 3 1/3 years from now there will be double what there is now. Yikes! How do we cope? I typed into Google, “how to deal with information overload?” and got over 1.7 million results. I think my brain has just froze. I need to reboot.