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Managing Information Overload is without doubt one of the most important skills an individual can develop today.  With the massive increase in information availability, and with it bombarding us every day, we see people and organisations struggling to maintain their performance as they get weighed down.

For me my tweets and emails are streaming in. This causes several problems. 1. It gets harder to discern what actually is important. 2. It adds stress to your life. You feel like a rat that always needs to push the button for another pellet. 3. It makes it harder to deal with people around you like family and friends. After all, there's another tweet to read, another email to answer, another Quora question to ponder. 4. It makes taking the time to really ponder questions like these more difficult. 5. Sleep often is lost due to always trying to "keep up." 6. Health suffers because you aren't paying attention to that, or exercising, instead you are paying attention to the stream of info aimed at you.

We assign blame for our overconsumption in odd ways. Gulp down one too many cupcakes and that's 100% on you. Yet, if you're overwhelmed by the fire hose/deluge/tsunami of information, blame must be placed elsewhere: on those glutton-minded information sources or the overall degradation of society or ... anywhere really, as long as it doesn't reflect back on your own lack of control. Information overload seems to always be someone else's fault.

One thing about information - there's a lot of it out there, but the good news is, most of it, you will never need.

Engagement is a good thing, of course. The preference to be not bored is pretty universal. But with time constraints and information overload, getting and maintaining people's already short attention spans is harder than ever. So, marketers and content specialists are turning to gamification as the latest Holy Grail. Too bad they don't know what they're doing. Gamification without solid core ideas to communicate, and a clear, concise method of doing so, is doomed to fail. It's about as effective as taking a PowerPoint deck and just changing every fifth slide to read "REMEMBER TO HAVE FUN!" Attention getting? Maybe. More effective communication? No. Just lipstick on a pig.