Matt Richtel, Reporter, Bits, The New York Times

Read This and Cost Your Company Dough

December 23, 2008 at 12:03 am PT

The question is not whether the nation is overwhelmed with checking email and RSS feeds, answering calls, exchanging instant messages, surfing the Web, watching YouTube and playing that one game where you try to organize the falling blocks.

The question is how much money all of this costs.

Basex, a research firm, estimates in data published on Monday that information overload costs the economy $900 billion a year in lost productivity. And a new online calculator created by Basex professes to provide a rough estimate of the cost to individual companies.

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Tagged with: Basex, Bits, email, instant messages, Internet, Matt Richtel, productivity, RSS feeds, The New York Times, Web, YouTube

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