Posts Tagged ‘Information Overload’

« Older Entries

Mind mapping as a tool to frame a problem

Friday, October 10th, 2008

 Information Overload Is a Filter Problem by Stephen E. Arnold

"The final issue I have is that I don’t have an answer to this question: “When I don’t know what I need to answer my question, what do I filter in and out?”
 
Indeed, this is a critical question that kick starts the thinking process. A good starting point is to map out the problem and identify as many attributes and components of the question.
 
Mind mapping facilitates identification and organization of complex ideas into clearly defined concepts and ideas. Using mind mapping tools helps immensely to portray the problem by using keywords, short phrases, and pictures which all are interconnected.
 
The strength of this approach is its simplicity. Through associative thinking, brainstorming, any problem will reveal links with relevant concepts and relationships. In fact, visually mapping a problem serves as an effective filter to frame the issues and validate understanding of the problem. Once this is done it is much easier to search for answers.
 
 
Download Context Organizer today.
 
Tags: , , ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

Information overload is a misnomer

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Using “R&D” Projects to Stop Information Overload by Andre Kibbe

1-Sentence Summary*

Anyone afflicted with information overload is preoccupied with information’s value rather than its relevance.

But when you’re engaged in a research project, begin with the end in mind and ask yourself from moment to moment, “What problem am I trying to solve?”, and confine yourself to looking up information that solves your immediate problem.

 

I may add that equally important is to evaluate your progress along the way. If you can review your goals systematically you’re that much better off. It boils down to keeping your objectives sharply focused in your mind and constantly prioritizing your information needs.  

 * 1-Sentence Summary is done using Context Organizer.

Download Context Organizer today.

Tags: ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Clay Shirky emphasizes that when we get too much information than the question that needs to be asked is: what filters do I need to stop unwanted information?

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo Clay Shirky gave an insightful account about our contemporary challenge of managing information. In a common sense manner he says that the issue is not information overload but rather the failure of filtering systems.

Clay Shirky astutely observes that information overload has been around since the Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.
In plain language and using entertaining examples he simply says that we need to filter for quality and relevancy of information and not quantity.
 Please check out Clay’s keynote for yourself:
Clay Shirky emphasizes that when we get too much information than the question that needs to be asked is: what filters do I need to stop unwanted information?
I may add that the most effective filtering is done through context. It is context that defines our information needs and ultimately decides on the usability and value of information.

Download Context Organizer today.

Tags: ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

A summary is worth a thousand of words

Thursday, August 28th, 2008
 
A summary is a shortened version of the original. The main purpose of such a simplification is to highlight the major points from the genuine (much longer) subject, e.g. a text, a film or an event. The aim is to help the audience get the gist in a short period of time. (Wikipedia)
 
The way we learn, remember and quickly recall has a strong relationship to the way we are able to process information without overloading our senses.
 
If our goal in understanding information is to quickly extract and convey meaning, then the use of summaries is essential. Summaries can be the key to understanding and reducing complex information to indispensable facts.
 
We can say that summaries are the bare models of thoughts and that summarized information represents the authorʼs best goals and intentions.

The act of instantly summarizing a web page can be an accelerator to quick understanding. By seeing the keywords in context, we, the readers, can quickly understand, connect and retain new information.

 
Summarization is relevant to all information workers, irrespective of their expertise. When we read, we always have to parse the text. We read and re-read to extract the main statements. We underline important ideas and arguments according to the main statement. We work hard to assemble all the pertinent facts in logical order. And once all of this is done we then check if the summary reflects the original conclusions.
 
All of these hard and time consuming tasks can be greatly facilitated with the use of Context Organizer. With the click of a button, the essential keywords, sentences and context are revealed and highlighted. The keywords serve as a back-of-the-book index to the key statements and facts.
  
You may think about the Context Organizer summaries as an instant help in making sense by focusing on the key facts and conclusions only.
 
Context Organizer summaries allow busy professionals to save time.  It helps them to daily sift through copious amounts of information and rapidly review, compare and analyze information.
 
 
You can download and try out Context Organizer for free.
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

Increase personal productivity with Context Organizer

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
 
Individuals using Context Organizer software have found a way to dramatically reduce information overload by summarizing the web pages, emails, and documents they are reading. 
 
The time wasted on searching, retrieving and analyzing information adds an often unexpected effort and price to our work.

From experience, we know that the costs of not finding information can be significant affecting collaboration, timely task completion, and decision-making.
 
Individuals using Context Organizer software have found a way to dramatically reduce information overload by summarizing the web pages, emails, and documents they are reading. 

The Context Organizer dashboard allows you to quickly summarize information from anywhere, organize it in thematic collections, and easily share it with others.

The time savings occur on many levels. First, you get an instant summary of what you are reading with emphasis on the most relevant keywords and context of use. Also, your Google and Live Search searches are automatically summarized so your web search review is hugely accelerated.

You are always in control deciding how much information and what kind of information is displayed at any time by using smart filters. This helps you with focusing only on the information that matters most to you. The summaries are clearly presented in a compelling visual format for ease and speed of understanding

You can easily share with your colleagues what’s important in documents and spare their time and effort from ploughing through unnecessary content.
 
Summarizing with Context Organizer can offer a unique solution that not only allows you to gain exceptional control of information, it also improves the clarity of your thoughts.
 
 
You can download and try out Context Organizer for free.
Tags: , , ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

The Knowledge Discovery Challenge

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Context Organizer summaries instantly show you the "big picture" enabling you to quickly and visually understand large amounts of information, organized by relevancy so you instantly get clear view of the essential content. 

One of the challenges is that we always have far too much to read and research, and not enough time to do it. Whether we are studying, writing blogs, doing product research, competitive analysis, or searching the web, we always run out of time to tackle our enormous reading stacks. 

Given the ever-increasing amounts of information we face today, it is necessary to find more effective methods for mining and discovering hidden knowledge. 
  
The major obstacle we face is that too much content hides the relevant message; there is also a lack of context. Often, the content lacks clear structure, which makes reading and understanding more difficult.
 
Work Smarter with Context Organizer
Context Organizer summaries instantly show you the "big picture" enabling you to quickly and visually understand large amounts of information, organized by relevancy so you instantly get clear view of the essential content. 
 
With Context Organizerʼs summaries you are making informed decisions in less time. And that is only the beginning.  The summaries are also blueprints for action, enabling you to speed read, rapidly take notes, summarize Google search results, instantly generate MindManager mind maps, and filter information according to your interests.
 
Focus on results not the tool - Think Creatively
With its intuitive, highly interactive interface, Context Organizer summaries are created in a snap. The creation of summaries promotes quick understanding by focusing on the essential content only, while superfluous information is filtered out.
 
Context Organizer summaries increase your ability to text mine documents’ key ideas and facts; you achieve it quickly and effortlessly, leaving you more time for strategic and creative thinking.
 
Save Time
Context Organizer integrates with and complements existing desktop tools so you can immediately realize productivity gains without interruption or ramp up time. Using Context Organizer enhances the quality and speed of strategic thinking, accelerates research, learning, project and process planning, and increases personal and team productivity.
 
For ease of use, Context Organizer is seamlessly integrated with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Windows Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Mindjet MindManager.
 
In essence, whenever you read web pages, emails, and documents, you can simply just click a button to instantly spotlight the key ideas and facts; no more information overload.
  
You can download and try out Context Organizer for free.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

The Context Organizer Method

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Context Organizer’s power to visualize critical information is akin to creating on the spot maps to help you effortlessly navigate through web pages.  In an instant, large amounts of information are simplified and reduced to the most essential storyline, which is easy to understand and learn.
 
Context Organizer summaries simplify complex text into an organized, easy-to-understand visual format.
 
At a glance,you see the essential keywords and summaries. You do not need to read the full text of  web pages, emails and documents in order to know what they contain.
 
Context Organizer summaries facilitate the rapid discovery of ideas, simplify complex content, inspire creativity, and save enormous amounts of time and effort. With a simple visual presentation, users can immediately focus on the critical information and make decisions.
 
Context Organizer’s powerful filters enable easy exposure of desired information. The Short Summary instantly spotlights the most important conclusions saving you time and effort by discovering critical findings and eliminating information overload.
 
Convenient note taking allows you to effortlessly text mine to rapidly create your own documents and notes. It is a handy tool for learning and studying.
 
Summarized Google search results save you time in reviewing and discovering the essential fragments hidden in web pages.  With Context Organizer’s review and summarization of Google search results is very fast and effortless.
 
Speed reading with Context Organizer is as simple as clicking on a button. Summaries and keywords ranked by relevance are instantly discovered and presented to you for review and note taking.
 
MindManager mind mapping is completely automated with Context Organizer. With the simple click of a button, you can instantly create a MindManager map.
 
In conclusion, Context Organizer’s power to visualize critical information is akin to creating on the spot maps to help you effortlessly navigate through web pages.  In an instant, large amounts of information are simplified and reduced to the most essential storyline, which is easy to understand and learn.
 
You can download and try out Context Organizer for free.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

Brain overload: device too busy

Monday, August 11th, 2008

In this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information. 

 
How often do you feel like the student in Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, and are tempted to say, “Please, sir, may I please be excused? My head is full.”
 
A disk device can become so overwhelmed with Input – Output requests and at one point, it will flash some warning messages asking you to increase your storage, or defragment it, or delete unneeded files. But what can we do when our brains are overwhelmed with information?
 
In this age of social media, we create informational flows of near unrestrained magnitude from countless sources. In effect, the sheer amount of information threatens to hide really valuable information.
 
The traditional process of ‘filter-then-publish‘– done by professional editors - has been inverted to ‘publish-then-filter‘. So now instead of relying on professional editors and librarians to make recommendations, we have to become experts ourselves.
 
The curious thing about this state is that seemingly accidental recommendations from many sources often result in remarkably high quality ideas – see crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. The challenge here is seeing how quickly we can discover them in the atomized universe; this is quite time consuming, which often leads to our brain overload. 
 
In parallel to the free-for-all publishing world, we also see new trends for creating collaborative methods for producing both aggregated and authoritative content that takes advantage of the limitless Web sources and yet can be trusted. Examples of such trends are Wikipedia, wikis and most recently Knols. This community approach, with a peer review process, for sharing knowledge and learning, manifests our need for creating dependable and trustworthy information sources.
 
It seems that the genius of connectedness offers us too many tempting directions; from time to time, we need to reach for some authoritative content to keep us on dry land and save us from drowning in information overload.
Tags:
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

Context Organizer: Read Less, Learn More

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

 Summarization tools are one of the most effective ways to efficiently filter information and reduce information overload. Context Organizer is an intelligent content finder which provides the most relevant summaries. 

 
Summarization tools are one of the most effective ways to efficiently filter information and reduce information overload.
 
The reason that summarization tools are of value is that the amount of information available on the web is overwhelming. There is far more information that we can hope to process; this phenomenon is commonly called “information overload”.
 

Context Organizer is an efficiency tool, which makes reading a breeze.
Users click on the Context Organizer icon to get an instant “glance” of the most important keywords and content they are reading on the Web.
 

 

In essence, Context Organizer is an intelligent content finder which provides the most relevant summaries.  Summarization makes sense because we do not have time to read anymore. Instead, we are skimming and scanning, quickly trying to spot what is of interest to us.
 
You could try Context Organizer and see for yourself just how summarization will make your reading more effective and focused and only on the subjects of your interest.
 
 
Tags: , , , ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »

The Myth of Information Overload Explained

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

 The Myth of Information Overload By: Vaughan Merlyn

 "There’s something about the term “information overload” that puts the cart before the horse…  If you think of the problem as information overload you might look for a solution that cuts back on the information, and that would be a crime!"

 There is no information overload but rather there is information wealth.

Vaughan Merlyn makes the point very succinctly. We cannot think about cutting down on information consumption. This would be foolish. Rather we need more intelligent tools and practices that allow us rapid and accurate access only to information that is relevant to us.
In many ways our work with Context Organizer is focused on giving the reader the essential summary instantly and saving the time by screening out the secondary details. The reader always prefers to be exposed to the key information first before seeing all the supporting information. Such presentation favours clarity and simplicity.

 

 1-Sentence Summary*

Tags: ,
Posted by Henry | No Comments »
« Older Entries