Are People Really Overloaded With Information?

Well I am and that's the whole reason I started Six Degrees of Data - so I really hope that people are overloaded ...

Luckily, just about everyone I talk too agrees with me but I have now finally had the chance to do some original research into this assertion.

 But first a little context. I decided to invite 1,300 people on my LinkedIn network to answer a set of questions about their reading habits, needs and strategies. I quickly received over 120 completed responses and the results were (I think) very interesting. Detailed survey results appear below but the headlines are:

• Professionals are still reading a lot of documents with more than 40% reading 50 or more a week
• 87% are required to consume large amounts of information in order to be able to do their job well
• 65% can't read everything that they should
• Computers deliver the majority of these documents to 87% of us
• But 80% of us don't have any special software to help us read and understand
• 92% believe that intelligent summaries and analysis would help.

Here are the answers to all 21 questions:

If you would like to keep in touch as any further research we do is published or simply want to be kept up to date as we launch our first products, then go to our web site at www.6ddbridger.com or drop me a line at [email protected] and I will add you to our (no-spam) mailing list.