Kind of off-topic, but I read this article on Yahoo! about how Americans are working more but accomplishing less. Here’s an excerpt:

Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products.

The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.

It kind of goes along with my earlier post about how we are constantly inundated with streams of information, and how can one person have the capability to process each and every one. But it’s also something I’ve thought about in my professional career. Emails, instant messages, information readily available, tools for making specific tasks “easier”. It’s no doubt that we as professionals are dealing with much more than our counterparts twenty years ago.

The bottleneck is simply, us, and is the nature of humans. We may or may not have the capacity to process all the information presented to us on a daily basis, that I think cannot yet be determined. What I do believe is as a society, we have not been trained properly to process these multiple streams. It’s a completely different way of operating with which we do not have much experience. The problem becomes, can we keep up with the trend, or will there be a point where a) humans are replaced with automated, more efficient machines in the workforce; or b) where technology is forced to slow down to keep up with human capacity?

Just a thought.