In today's flattened hierarchies, where delegation is the norm, the length of an individual's To Do list should be inversely proportional to his position within the company. With the client who had 120 items on his list, I gradually got him down to three items a day, and he saw an enormous increase in his effectiveness, but it took a bit of time in detox. Like all good things, information must be consumed in moderation. I've witnessed extreme cases where individuals pig out on information like adolescents with an eating disorder. My sessions with a senior executive of an international investment bank revealed that he was receiving an average of 50 e-mails every hour of his very long working day.
Overindulgence is simply an outward symptom of inward insecurity.
The risk of appearing uninformed is the stuff of executive anxiety dreams. But don't bite off more information than you can chew. Alerting people to the risks of overindulgence, and raising their awareness so that they distinguish between haute cuisine and junk food, are two key steps toward establishing a healthy, balanced information diet. It's not surprising that vision statements are becoming almost universal. There's nothing like a shared goal to galvanize people into action.