Sustainable Energy on the Web

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.”
Marshall McLuhan

Email is the default tool of business communication, whether we like it or not. And we appear to like it. Google wave’s courageous attempt to replace it with something else failed. Instead, every day, our e-mail inboxes are more inundated.

Yet many complain about email overload. Some have even declared email bankruptcy - rather than trying to clean up their inbox with thousands of messages, they have simply reset the counter to zero and start afresh, with a different email address.

Management is more art than science which dooms any attempt to find basic principles. Yet, some management practices prove remarkably persistent despite a lack of evidence that they actually work. This would not be such a big problem if they were harmless, but some have been demonstrated to reduce performance. Now, with new insights from brain science obtained through functional MRI, we have a better chance to understand what motivates people and can find better ways to manage.