Companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM have formed the Information Overload Research Group with the goal of helping people manage the amount of information they have to deal with in a day.

According to Jonathan Spira, one of the group’s founding members, wikis, blogs and RSS have made the deluge of information worse, rather than better.

Maggie Jackson (author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) also joins the conversation to talk about how all this information is eroding our attention spans. It’s very interesting  and well worth a listen.

You can listen to the entire discussion at the link I’ve provided (and cheers to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for putting their content online).

But in the same breath, we should also note that only 42% are actually reading blogs via a newsreader — and these are the very same people who are inclined to answer a survey about feeds, blogs and wikis (and not a random sample of your average corporate users).

The number one concern among those corporate folks who haven’t started a blog? Time. 59% were worried that creating a blog would be too time consuming and 57% were worried about what to write about (one could argue that these are also probably the biggest reasons for the average person not starting a blog either). So what does this all boil down to in the end? Money, of course.

For anyone looking to create a blog (whether that’s a CEO or just the average web user), that person is looking for some return on the investment of time and energy they are going to devote to a blog. Calculating that return is not always easy to do.

While it’s certainly not all about the numbers, who doesn’t want to see some kind of return on their time? While the syndication of content is certainly not going anywhere, the relationship between blogging and feeds might. While 85% of people may say that blogging is not a fad, 67% also say that blogging will become a must-have marketing and communications tool.

The future of blogging in a business setting seems very uncertain — even if you’re able to track your blog very carefully in terms of metrics, how do you determine how much more approachable people felt your brand was after reading your blog?

The guy mentioned here even uses Excel to keep track of his time. Wow (he does have some very innovative points, I just don’t know that I’d ever use Excel for that purpose).

I’m not going to suggset you get that organized. It’s more about what you don’t do, rather than adding more time-tracking techniques into an already busy schedule.

Let’s get into some quick tips.

1. Stop checking your email.

How much time do you waste during a day checking your email?

Constantly checking your email also creates an expectation (whether conscious or subconscious) that we are always available by email, while also wasting time responding to one or two emails here and there.

If you’re always available to answer others’ questions, you will never get any of your own tasks accomplished. It’s OK to be unavailable. It’s easier to answer ten emails at once then to keep going back ten times to answer one email.

2. Stop measuring measuring small successes.

We’re all guilty of doing this. We write a paragraph in a report or email that we think is particularly good and we go back and read it again.

There are many times where it’s easy to stop half-way through a task and think about the job that we’re doing.

While it’s good to be reflective about the tasks your taking on, don’t stop every few minutes to contemplate whether you’re doing a good job or not. Just keep going.

3. Write down what you need to do and how long you need to do it.

Don’t spend a huge amount of time doing this. Write down a quick note to yourself of the most important things you need to do, and approximately how long you need to do each item.

Take a look at your list at the end of the day: did writing that email that you planned to take fifteen minutes to do actually take you an hour?

From this list, figure out where your weak spots are. The point here is not to try to cram an hour task into fifteen minutes, but rather to be realistic about the amount of time it takes you to do something.

4. Keep to your schedule.

While there are various events that will come up in your day that are unavoidable, keep to your schedule as much as you can.

While that may mean cutting certain meetings with people or conversations short, it’s important to maintaining your own efficiency that you don’t spend too much time on one specific task or topic.

If you’re still having trouble getting focused on the task at hand, you might find these 10 tips from Matthew Stibbe over at badlanguage.net useful.