Information overload: tips for focusing on what you need and ignoring what you don't.

field, whether for obstetricians receiving notice that a patient is in labor or a biomedical equipment technician getting the urgent call that the hospital’s computed tomography (CT) machine has gone down at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. For many professionals, though, clocking out at 5:00 used to mean being off-duty until the next morning. Today, the latest technology the Information Age has to offer has done wonders for increasing the efficiency of our communications. Round-the-clock work-related communication has become commonplace, especially in the medical field. But there can be a downside, too: How to manage that overabundance of information. Everyone understands the realities of an on-call job, but cell phones and e-mail can make being out of touch out of style or, worse, unacceptable to the boss. All this instant communication can feel productive in the shortterm, but too many e-mails and phone calls can decrease productivity and eventually lead to burnout unless carefully managed. So what’s an overloaded employee to do? Peggy Duncan, a personal-productivity expert in Atlanta, suggests taking a step back to consider your work habits and your preferred work technologies and how you use them. “E-mail and the BlackBerry by themselves are not the problem. People are the problem,” she says. “You have to look at your processes. You do it for technical issues, but engineers and managers don’t necessarily look at the processes they need to manage their own daily work flow.” Duncan lives by a rule that sounds simple, but is not necessarily easy: “For anything that you do more than three times, develop a process,” she says. “But that requires stopping and thinking, when people just want to get on with business. Typically, people do things the way they’ve always done them or the way their predecessor Tips for Focusing on What You Need