Is Communication Overload Killing Your Mojo?

The choices for real-time communication on the internet have grown and changed dramatically in just the past 5 years.

We can choose between the traditional phone call, video calls, instant message, email, text message, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, Skype calls,and more.  

Recently Facebook and Twitter have been reported to add “voice chat” meaning that even “phone call” modes are expanding.  There are many studies and statistics around mode preferences by demographics so I won’t get into that here.  
 

To further complicate the situation, many of us have multiple “personalities”.  We have business and personal emails, voice mail boxes, multiple phone numbers, multiple social network ID’s etc.  Our personal and professional lives are blended together far more than before.  We have multiple ways of reaching out to people and they have the same choices in trying to reach us.

For me personally, this new communication mode reality creates “communication overload”.  What is communication overload?  At the very least, it’s the need to consciously prioritize and monitor the many avenues that someone, business or personal, may try to reach me.  It’s also about consciously making the choice of which mode you want to use to reach out to people.  What do they prefer?  Where are they present at the moment?  With all the other information available to us, managing your communications can certainly be another headache. 

Solutions I’d like to see.  In short, “unified communications” is expanding and needs to expand further. I think of it as a communications dashboard to aggregate the data of multiple apps into one view.  What could this dashboard be?

It should now certainly add in knowledge of social networks that my contacts use.  Show me their presence, or not, on these networks, Skype etc when I look to reach or reply to them and one touch to launch it. It should give me a dashboard view of all incoming attempts to reach me no matter what the media was.  I think of it as a communications log as opposed to a call log.
 

I also want an alert window to specifically show me messages my filter criteria say I should go look at first.  I’d like the ability to flag or receive an alert on for communication attempts based on who, time of day, my presence, and a keyword filter on what they are trying to contact me about.   I also want keyword filters (ala "Tweetdeck") applied to voice mails, phone calls and emails. The thought here is to be alerted to check certain contact attempts rather than not knowing what’s there until I remember to check each and every one of the communication channels I'm part of. 

Most importantly, the filtering has to grow to aggregate all my incoming communications and control what, when, how they get through to me based on my criteria. There are efforts heading in this direction (Google Voice for voice and Tweetdeck and 100 others for Twitter) but this consolidation/aggregation is moving too slow for me. The number of options for communication seems to be outstripping the pace at which aggregation solutions are converging these options into a single point of control. The number one cause of death in 2010, or at least #1 cause of mental breakdown, may well be "information/communication overload".

Do you suffer “communication overload”? Is it killing your Mojo? Is Dr. Evil behind all this!! How much more of this can you take? 

I’d like to hear from you about what you think has to happen to manage this flood of communication overload.