It’s fun sending email, isn’t it?

Especially those funny stories or videos where you carbon copy all the names in your contacts list.

Wait… no. That’s wrong. Those are not fun, those are annoying.

Apparently, Basex Inc.–a web analytics firm–agrees with me. They named “information overload” as the number one problem for the coming year of 2008. Seems that workers get disoriented and distracted every time they receive a new email–keeping them off balance and off-task. And people, I guess, just get endless amounts of joy from hitting the “Send” button, so we’re sending more and more email every day. From the article:

“It’s too much information. It’s too many interruptions. It’s too much lost time,” Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. “It’s always too much of a good thing.”

Hang on a second….I just got the most hilarious email forward that I have to go check out.

(2 hours later)

Still there? Good. Sorry about that. Now where was I?

Man, I guess these Basex folks are right… email can be a distraction. In fact, They estimate that this “information overload” cost employers about $650 Billion in 2006. Yikes! Their advice? Resist the urge to reply immediately to all incoming messages, and tone down the instant messages and use of the “reply to all” feature.

Or at least make sure the folks you’re emailing constantly don’t have a full-time job to be distracted from.