Too much information, too many projects and competing priorities?
The exponential growth of information and communication technology places leaders in the position of spending 90% of their time managing information and technology rather than focusing on the people they lead, the business processes they manage and their customers. 
"People are in constant interrupt mode at work, bombarded with phone calls, drop-ins and email. They work on the immediate new thing that comes across their desk via email, rather than what is important. It’s almost like everyone has attention deficit disorder (ADD).” - Research Participant
After conducting three years of research on the topic of information overload I coined the phrase eADD, which is an electronically induced attention deficit disorder that occurs when people receive more information than they can process without suffering unintended consequences.
My Wake-up Call
I began this research after a personal experience of arriving in a distant city in the middle of the night only to discover I had no hotel reservation. I had the map from the airport to the conference hotel in my hand and knew I had visited the hotel's Web site, but alas, no reservation. I realized I had been interrupted while making on-line reservations and failed to complete the task.
At that moment, I realized I suffered from information overload and thought it was my fault. If I could just be more organized, avoid distractions and stay focused then I could manage this problem. When personal strategies for managing the problem failed to solve it, I blamed the information sources - thinking there was just too much information coming across my desk.
I quickly moved from thinking it was a personal problem, or an information problem to blaming technology. I thought if software companies could only design software for people with my cognitive style, and could organize this deludge of information, then I could manage the problem.
My Research
Enough about me! I began to research the issue of information overload and found the mother lode on the topic - a meta analysis of the literature conducted by Eppler and Mengis (2003). They recommended a research framework for studying the problem. This reseach framework requires an analysis of five factors that contribute to information overload: Characteristics of the information we are required to process
Types of tasks we perform with the information we receive
Technology we use to assist us in performing tasks
Personal/human factors that help/hinder information management
Organizational factors that impact our effectiveness
While there is a plethora of reseach published on the topic of information overload, Eppler and Mengis indicated there was a lack of research that provides "deep context." They suggest most information overload research is experimental, survey based or purely conceptual. They called for context-rich research on the topic.
Please visit the "Published Research" tab at the top of this site for a link to my doctoral dissertation on this topic.