You start your ponderings about the “information overload” that threatens managers the world over by mentioning that the term has been popularized by Alvin Toffler (“Too Much Information,” July 2, 2011). Wow! Like much else the hapless futurist has come up with, beginning with his Future Shock (1970), little is worth remembering, let alone quoting. The human brain is made to process only so much information at any one time. It can cope neither with more nor with less. What has changed since roughly a hundred-thousand years ago is the number of people a human has to deal with from day to day. Originally, it was up to a hundred and fifty or so. Not even a shaman could “manage” more. Since about five-thousand years ago, when urbanization started in the wake of the agricultural revolution, the number has become too large, and especially for kings and queens. But the communication overload is here to stay. No advice will help, no matter how clever, including the gems that crafty management consultants you cite have on offer: find time to focus, filter out noise, and forget about work when you can. For the underlying cause of the trouble is rather simple. To coin a nifty term, it is the population overload. Not to shed tears, though. Climate change will usher a straightforward solution to the problem soon enough.