By Janet Fox

Too much work and too little time. Guilt at the sight of our overstuffed in-baskets and piles of unread periodicals. Frustration at not having time to understand and integrate and use the information we have amassed. The effort of trying to remember where things are and what needs to be done.

The symptoms are familiar, and many of the victims blame themselves. They're embarrassed because they can't find the phone number they wrote down or the study that's buried in one of the piles on the desk. They feel stupid and inadequate when most of the items on their "to do" lists are still undone at the end of the day. They worry about the trouble they have concentrating, and the way their minds jump unproductively among all the tasks that need to be completed. They wake up in the middle of the night and worry about the deadline, the meeting, the oversight.

The disease has been called information anxiety. The sense of being overwhelmed by work and squeezed for time can be traced directly to the explosion of information, in the form of written materials, phone calls, E-mail and face-to-face meetings. Today, when the majority of occupations in the United States revolve around the processing of information, it afflicts most of us. If we tell ourselves that things are going to settle down when the new person is hired, when we get used to the new software, when the busy season is over, we're kidding ourselves. The Information Age is just beginning.

There has never been a time like this. As Michael J. McCarthy writes in his book Mastering the Information Age (Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1991), more new information has been produced in the past 30 years than in the previous 5,000; a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person of the 16th century would encounter in a lifetime; and the amount of available information now doubles every five years. We're caught in the gap between the proliferation of data and the knowledge of what to do with it all.

Before we can hope to cure our information anxiety, it helps to understand exactly what factors are contributing to the sense of being overwhelmed and increasingly out of control.

First, both the volume and the speed at which information comes at us are accelerating. "People used to send letters," says Kerry Gleeson, whose l0-year-old company the Institute for Business Technology, helps employees of large companies get themselves organized to work efficiently. "You would get a letter and then spend a couple of days thinking about it. Now you get fares and E-mail, and you're expected to respond in hours, or minutes."

Second, our education has not prepared us to deal with the information explosion. Not only do most people lack training in the technology we must now use daily, but we are the products of schooling that emphasizes memorization rather than independent, creative thinking. In school, many of us could get by with reading slowly and inefficiently, without connecting new information to what we already knew. No more.

Third, most of the systems devised for managing time and organizing and storing information and resources don't work well for hall the people in the world--the people who are right-brain dominant. And all of us, whether we customarily operate more from the left or the right brain hemisphere, now need to use our whole brains to learn, to manage and to communicate.

And finally, well-entrenched values, habits and attitudes that once may have been useful and desirable often get in the way of learning to cope with new realities. One is the virtue of saving things, a legacy of the "waste not, want not" philosophy handed down to many of today's adults by their Depression-conditioned parents and grandparents. The habit of hanging on to magazines, reports and miscellaneous paper keeps many people buried in clutter, increasingly unable to find anything or accomplish anything. But when most written information is outdated in months or weeks, it's far more useful to know how to find current information than to hoard old information.

Another villainous virtue is the tendency to perfectionism. People who want to do things very well must learn to resist the temptation to get hold of just one more piece of information and to take just one more day to polish their presentation or report.

Maneuvering through the Information Age requires more than sticking to a schedule and organizing a good filing system. Since it's impossible to read everything, know everything and do everything, we must decide clearly what we need to know and do, and eliminate everything else. It has become imperative to change the way we work, and to be constantly receptive to improving our own systems. From three people whose business it is to teach people skills for the Information Age, here are some tips:

·         Do it now. The first rule for improving efficiency is to act on every item the first time you see it, hear it or read it, says the IBT's Gleeson, whose strategy is set forth in his book, The Personal Efficiency Program: How to Get Organized to Do More Work in Less Time (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1994). Return the phone call when you get the message. Answer the customer's complaint letter as soon as you have read it.

The alternative to doing it now is to let piles of paper accumulate, there to reproach you every time you see them. Tasks that would take only a few minutes add up to heavy burdens that bog you down with guilt and contribute to the overall sense of lack of control. "Paper is like plaque," Gleeson says. "It grows every 12 hours, and if you don't floss, it will overwhelm you." He recommends setting aside enough time to deal with the mail completely, every day. As you read each piece, act on it, delegate it, file it or schedule it if a response requires more than a few minutes, and throw out the rest.

·         Make the trash can your best friend. "Being a saver is the single greatest cause of disorganization," says Dorothy Lehmkuhl, author, with Dolores Cotter Lamping, of Organizing for the Creative Person (Crown Publishers Inc., 1993). Creative, right-brain-dominant people are most likely to be savers, because they become emotionally attached to "stuff" and often love the printed word so much that they can't bear to throw away old magazines and catalogs.

A recent study shows that the average white-collar worker spends six weeks a year looking for things in the office. Most of the things we need are buried amid clutter that we will never use. Get rid of the useless stuff, Lehmkuhl says, even if you have to pay yourself a dollar for each item you throw away. Cut off information you aren't going to use at the source, Gleeson suggests. Have your name taken off mailing and distribution lists. Cancel subscriptions to periodicals you never get around to reading.

·         Keep a "not to do" list. What overwhelms many people is what they intend to do, but never get around to. Give yourself permission not to do things that are not of high priority to you. Don't finish the book. Don't return the phone call. Don't answer the appeal for a donation. Get rid of all the mail and stick-on notes that remind you of things you haven't done.

Deciding what not to do, or not to do yourself, involves analyzing what tasks in your life really add value to what you want and where you want to be. Gleeson recommends creative outsourcing: If your time could be better spent, get your groceries and laundry delivered; delegate the jobs that don't make the best use of your talents; pay someone to handle the aspects of your home-based business that drain your time and energy.

·         Set up organizing systems that work for you. If you're a right-brain type, you probably don't like file cabinets, Lehmkuhl observes. You want to see what you're up against, and you're afraid that you'll forget anything that concealed in a drawer You probably arrange things in piles on the floor around your desk, and you have lots of little reminder notes stuck on walls and other surfaces. A good system for you is open and horizontal--possibly a multicompartment desktop organizer in which you can categorize the papers you're working with.

Gleeson recommends having three trays--in, out and pending--on your desk, and three sets of files--working, research and archive. Since the main purpose of having files is to be able to find things easily, they should be organized into broad, general categories (the same thing goes for electronic files as for paper files). A good test is whether other people can find things in your files.

·         Don't try to remember. Remembering everything you have to attend to today, tomorrow, next week and the week after used to be an ability to be proud of. Today most professionals would be better off forgetting the tasks they are not working on at this moment, Gleeson says. Remembering, thinking about, and worrying about future meetings and deadlines only distracts you from what you're doing now. It's better to have a good reminder system.

Gleeson's is on his computer. When he gets off the phone, he might enter "Call Emma Friday about the XYZ Company site visit." His message is automatically entered under "Emma," "Friday," "XYZ Company" and "Site Visits." It's almost as easy to set up and use a paper tickler system. As part of your working files, you have folders labeled one through 31 and one through 12, for days of the month and months of the year. Reminders and documents pertaining to any activities that can't be done now go immediately into the appropriate file.

·         Weekly planning. A week is the most practical unit of time to plan, Gleeson says. You might book yourself for 30 hours of work, leaving time for the unexpected things that always come up. He recommends allotting specific times for various tasks. If you block out Tuesday afternoon to write a speech, it will take all afternoon. If you give yourself from 2 to 3 p.m., you're much more likely to get it done in an hour.

·         Fill in the gaps in your Information Age skills. Most of us, McCarthy says, need to improve our ability to Gather, Access, Process and Share information. Part of every week might be devoted to filling in the GAPS--learning to read faster, with more focus and purpose; finding out which newsletters and databases will be most useful to us and learning how to use them; thinking about what we have read and heard so that we can use it to solve problems and detect trends; and working on our speaking and writing skills so that we can conduct productive meetings and present our ideas concisely and convincingly.

Despite all the anxiety the information explosion has unleashed, McCarthy is optimistic about our ability to master it. A practicing trial lawyer, he developed a series of seminars on speed reading and comprehension, now licensed to Probe Consulting of Vancouver.

"Reading is a practical teaching tool," he says. "When people see that they can quickly learn to read five times as fast, or 10 times as fast, it gives them confidence in themselves and demonstrates what the mind is capable of. And that's what we need most, the ability to trust what our brains can do."