Amy Leschke-Kahle was fed up with employees griping about information overload, their overflowing e-mail boxes and the family time they were losing as they struggled to stay afloat in a digital flood.

   So the development manager of internal employee training at Moline, Illinois-based John Deere set out nearly two years ago to offer a training class at the agricultural and forestry company, which employs 52,000 people worldwide. Her goal was not just to provide software tools, but to train interested employees to better handle e-mails, reports, text messages and numerous other competing information priorities without retreating into a self-defeatist mind-set.

  Since that first pilot course, involving about 20 employees in late 2006, at least 400 people have completed the nine-hour multi-week training at John Deere. Nearly nine out of 10 employees surveyed at least eight weeks after the training report that they’re using the strategies to ease their daily workload, Leschke-Kahle says.

  "What I’ve found is that for most people it’s not so much the issue of having the right piece of software or the right tool or the right gadget," she says. "What the training does is it opens people’s awareness up to the fact that, ‘Yes, I can manage this.’ And it gives them a toolbox to start figuring out what works for them."

  Information overload: the term has become used nearly to the point of cliché, but the phenomenon at corporate desks is real. Slightly more than seven out of every 10 U.S. workers report feeling inundated, according to a LexisNexis survey of 650 white-collar workers in December 2007. Forty-one percent say they will reach a "breaking point" if the volume continues to escalate. But corporate attention has recently begun to coalesce. Contact for complete article.