Insight, debate and solutions for restoring productivity and work/life balance in this age of Infoglut
The Information Overload Research Group is organizing a private one-day gathering of people who are leading the battle against Information Overload from a diversity of domains such as business, academia, technology, journalism, psychology, and research. If you share our passion, we’d love your attendance in San Francisco on Feb. 25, 2012.
For more details, and registration information, go to http://bit.ly/Ag7kzK .
See you there!
Although practically every organization is full of knowledge workers groaning under a deluge of email, it’s interesting to note that in many of them I run into a small minority of people who have things under control. I discover them on occasion when I explain the various solutions I can bring in, and someone says “Oh, but I already handle this by…” or “I never do that, I always…”
The things they do vary; my favorite are the rare heroes who tell me they turn off all electronic devices after work hours, but there are many variations. Basically these people have developed, on their own, Individual Coping Strategies that permit them to thrive despite the pressure of information overload. These strategies usually coincide with ones I evangelize, perhaps not surprisingly, but are self-developed from scratch by each such individual.
Now, if only they’d proliferate their methods to the entire organization! Rarely someone does, as I’ve described here, but most of these people are happy to use their methods for themselves without raising awareness to it around them. They’re staying afloat, all alone while those around them struggle in vain against the flood of messages. Their impact is felt, however, when the organization – or a senior leader in it – decides to take action; they can set an example when the time comes for a change.
If you are one of these trailblazers, do share your favorite method in the comments!
The proliferation of Blackberries and similar Smartphones has contributed significantly to the erosion of the Work/Life barrier, and has caused knowledge Workers to assume – erroneously, perhaps, but with conviction – that they must be on call 24×7. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly among my clients: people send and receive emails at all hours, and make a habit of checking their Blackberry every few minutes. Convincing these people to stop this addictive behavior is hopeless: I’ve run an experiment along these lines a few years back with a group of engineers and despite all exhortations to the contrary their behaviors remained the same.
Now we read about a bold move by a company that has decided to take responsibility for this problem. Car maker Volkswagen has interrupted the flow of distracting messages at the source; they’ve disabled the move of email messages to the Blackberry servers 30 minutes after the end of formal work hours, and until 30 minutes before the next workday begins. This will bring about what I like to call a “Technology assisted behavior change”: one that uses a technological component to make it impossible to violate a required behavior.
It’s encouraging to see that Volkswagen values its employees’ Work/Life balance and is willing to take an affirmative step to protect their personal time. In addition to being the right and moral thing to do, it is a smart move as well – employees that can relax after hours with their families will be much more focused and productive at work. It’s a Win/Win, and I hope other companies will take note. The fact that they involved the employees in defining this move is significant and should help this succeed.
Let me know if your own organization would consider this!
I visited a doctor’s office and was surprised when his secretary pulled out a card – a ruled cardboard rectangle – to fill in my data. She had boxes of such patient cards in her office. A natural first reaction would be that this doctor must be pretty old and behind the times…
Then I saw the doctor, and he was neither old nor behind – in fact he not only had a computer on his desk, but after a few minutes he whipped out an iPad, which he seemed very happy with and used with speed and effectiveness to demonstrate some points to me. So I asked him, what’s with the old cards?
The reply is worth noting: scribbling on a card allows him to maintain a personal interaction with his patients. To type, you have to turn away from the patient and immerse yourself in the machine’s user interface; a card is unobtrusive and its usage is much faster and less exclusive of the patient; you can use it facing the patient. On top of which , it is not prone to crashes and outages!
This all made good sense – but unfortunately is not going to last: the doc told me he expects that the medical establishment (HMOs, hospitals, insurers, etc) will soon force all physicians to use their mandated computer tools, and that will be that. Come to think of it, if they took the extra step to port their software to the iPad, which is almost as flat as a card, we may have the best of both worlds!
I was discussing with a college student I’ve been advising whether it was a good or a bad thing that Google makes access to answers so easy. To my surprise, she opined that it’s a bad thing – because people who use Google to answer a question are more likely to forget the answer they find, whereas if they have to think the problem through and discover the answer for themselves they will remember it in the long term.
An interesting insight from a Gen Y. But what struck me as remarkable was the fact that this is not a new argument; I’ve seen it before – in Plato’s dialog Phaedrus (written ca. 370 BC), where Socrates tells an Egyptian legend wherein the god Thoth invents Writing and presents in to the Pharaoh as a gift. This, says Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories and more wisdom. The king replies:
“… this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves … they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing … they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”. [Source]
Looks like my student was of the same view as Socrates! And she may have a point – some of the methods young people use today to compile class assignments can be disturbing, to say the least. On the other hand, in the hand of a smart and conscientious student Google is a powerful tool indeed, and I think that its shortcomings are handsomely offset by its benefits, notably access to unprecedented quantities of knowledge. Besides, with all respect to Socrates, Writing has been around for millennia and nobody seems to complain…
But as the clincher, I must disclose that I did remember reading somewhere about the Thoth story, but I had to Google it to get the details for this post. Score one for Google!
Email overload tends to go up the more senior you get; executive level managers can easily get a few hundred incoming work-related messages a day. This is so commonplace that they don’t even stop to complain about it; they either cope with the crushing stress or they delegate their Inbox processing to an assistant.
I’ve known one glaring exception, however. I knew one senior manager, a VP of a hi-tech Fortune 500, who had a perennially near-empty inbox, and was receiving a paltry few dozen emails a day. I inquired as to how he got to this enviable state, and he was happy to share. It was quite simple, in a way: this manager simply empowered those under him to do their jobs, and insisted they NOT copy him on email they could handle without him. Rather than hoard updates and status reports he could very well do without, rather than have his people cover their behinds by copying him on everything under the sun, he kept his time and mind free and uncluttered, which allowed him to actually manage – guide, role model and mentor those below him in the organization.
Of course when I say it was simple, that is not accurate: it takes a very unusual personality to manage in this manner, and to overcome old customs and the entrenched attitudes of those around one. Only one in a hundred managers may have what it takes.
Can you be the one?
I’ve written before about various methods of ensuring freedom from interruption in the office; but pre-dating these there was the familiar “Do not Disturb” sign you hang on a hotel room door knob. These used to come in different colors, but they kept pretty much to the same form dictated by their function. A cardboard rectangle with hole… what was there to improve?
Well, on my recent trip to Berlin I saw what someone felt is the next great leap in interruption-busters. The NH Hotel we stayed in had a switch inside the room that would light an electric sign outside it. No more messing with cardboard.
This looks like an improvement… except for one minor detail: it would be all too easy to forget the sign ON when you leave the room, thereby preventing the staff from making your room up in your absence. The old system did not share this drawback – when you shut the door the dangling sign would be sure to catch you eye.
Seems to me that this idea could be made to work better if opening the door would switch the sign off automatically… But then, I am not a Hotel Systems consultant, am I?
I’ve pointed out that people don’t read the emails they’re replying to… and here is one more common manifestation of this: when you send someone an email asking two or three questions, you can be almost certain the reply will only address the first one. The recipient reads your mail, hits a question, responds to it and moves to another message. Then you need to write them another message to get the other items addressed (and create more overload for both parties).
This being the universal case, there are steps you can take to defend against this tendency (besides sending each query in a separate email, which is the common and failsafe solution but exacerbates the IO problem).
Of course, you can do none of these and hope for the best… but I wouldn’t advise it!
The intent of email is to facilitate communication. Right?
So – someone mails me to ask to meet Tuesday. I send a reply:
I can’t meet Face to Face that day, so let’s do it by phone – can you do it at 3 PM?
The reply I get says:
If it’s FTF I can’t, can we do it on the phone?
This happens all the time: you explicitly write something – and your correspondent acts as if it weren’t there. Can’t they read?!
Truth is, they can read all right, but they have so many emails, so little time, and so many distractions that they only scan the message ever so quickly and react to the first thing that registers. Which results in incomplete communication, which requires more mails to resolve the mess, which increases the load… a classic runaway positive feedback loop!
Every year in October Basex, a New York based analyst company that is very active in the war on Info Overload, announces the observance of the worldwide Information Overload Awareness Day. This holiday, which is sponsored by our Information Overload Research Group, may not cure the problem that is exacting a growing toll on the effectiveness and sanity of knowledge workers worldwide, but it is a way to give some reach to the message that something needs to be done about it!
This year the day is Thursday, Oct. 20, and I urge you to devote some time during that day to consider how you can reduce the overload you suffer and the one you create for others – and to disseminate this call for action through your own social channels. If we all try to reduce the overload for those around us, we will make the world a better place.
Happy IOAD, folks!
