Archive for October, 2009

The risk of doing mail in a meeting

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 30, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

Everybody “does mail” in meetings. These days it’s email, and earlier it was snail mail; whether the attendees sit with a glassy stare fixed on their notebook screens or they shuffle piles of paper, the impact on the meeting’s effectiveness is obviously negative. This is hardly new behavior… as a hilarious anecdote from ancient Rome illustrates. This is a true story, documented by Plutarch.

The attendee in question is none less than Julius Caesar himself, who was standing in front of the Roman senate, engaged in a debate with his arch-opponent Cato (the younger). Someone came in and delivered a letter to Caesar in the middle of the meeting, and he couldn’t resist reading it – much like a manager glancing at his BlackBerry screen today. Cato seized the opportunity and declared that this must be a letter from enemies of Rome and insisted it be surrendered and read. Caesar gave him the letter, and we can only imagine the strait-laced Cato’s indignant embarrassment when he read it to discover that it was a love letter from Servilia, Caesar’s mistress and mother to Brutus. It didn’t help that Servilia was Cato’s own sister…

Plutarch describes Cato’s reaction: he threw the note to JC with a curse and moved on. He doesn’t tell us what Caesar did, but I can imagine that – being anything but strait-laced – he must’ve rather enjoyed himself…

If you’re curious, here is the original story: It is said also that when the great conspiracy of Catiline, which came near overthrowing the city, had come to the ears of the senate, Cato and Caesar, who were of different opinions about the matter, were standing side by side, and just then a little note was handed to Caesar from outside, which he read quietly. But Cato cried out that Caesar was outrageously receiving letters of instruction from the enemy. At this, a great tumult arose, and Caesar gave the missive, just as it was, to Cato. Cato found, when he read it, that it was a wanton bit of writing from his sister Servilia, and throwing it to Caesar with the words “Take it, thou sot,” turned again to the business under discussion.

To attach, or not to attach?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 27, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 4 Comments

There I was, flying across the Atlantic and blogging. Continental now have AC power under every seat, so I could use my notebook as long as I wanted; and the first thing I did was clean out my email. Except for the few messages that included a URL and a description intriguing enough to make me want to check the full article they pointed at. For that I had to wait to be on Terra Firma. It would’ve been better had the senders pasted the entire article.

Which reminds me that some years ago, the idea of sending pointers instead of a full attachment was the latest rage. This was motivated by tight mailbox quotas coupled with slow networking, especially from home (remember 14.4 KBPS modems?) Somehow the notion that this was a smart thing to do caught on among the user population; it did have a sensible ring to it, an aura of thrift… but was it a good idea?

In a world of perfect connectivity, placing a single copy on the web, or the company Intranet, or a group repository like MS SharePoint, then sending people pointers to it, would make perfect sense. In the real world, where mail storage is now cheap and often  plentiful but we are still offline at many times, this is a compromise. Whether it’s one worth making depends on the situation. In the years when connectivity was costly I’d tell my coworkers and trainees: if you send the document to a list most of whom need to read it, you might as well attach it to the message. That way they’ll have the freedom to read it anywhere, and you won’t save any traffic by keeping it online (because they’ll all be pulling the content when they read it there). Put it on the network and send out a link only when most recipients will not need to open it.

Today, as long as you have plentiful storage and bauds, there’s no reason not to attach anything you want the recipient to read. At least I don’t think so – do you see a scenario to the contrary?

Mine eyes have seen the Glory!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 26, 2009
in Off-topic
. 0 Comments

No, sorry, not of the coming of the Lord. Earlier today, while flying over the East Coast, mine eyes have seen the Glory, a lovely but elusive optical phenomenon.

I know what it is because of an old Scientific American article I’d read as a kid, which discussed meteorological optical phenomena, mainly rainbows of all kinds. The Glory was perhaps the strangest of the lot, and it stuck in my tender future-physicist mind.
The Glory around an airplane shadow

As you can see in the rather poor photo I managed on my Nokia, a Glory is a circular rainbow that forms on a cloud of water droplets around the shadow of an object – such as an airplane – standign between it and the sun. The sun was shining from the other side of the plane (these days, when you can reserve your seats online, I make sure to have a window away from the sun, so I can see the planet’s surface without the dazzle of direct sunlight) and though our shadow was barely visible, the colorful halo of diffracted light around it was plainly there, delighting us as it flew alongside us for more than an hour.

Hallelujah!

Should we remove the pesky Reply to All?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 23, 2009
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

There are many technology solutions that help reduce information overload, with varying degrees of success; I’ll be reviewing many of them in this blog. But the simplest of these is this: remove the Reply to All (RTA) button from the email client! Technically, this is trivial to implement, a simple customization. But it is interesting to study the reactions the idea elicits.

Reply to All is a major pain point in the enterprise; not that it doesn’t have many valid and useful uses, but there are always a sufficient number of people around who will send a Reply to All when replying to something nobody needs to know, like what entree they prefer in the coming departmental dinner. This is so visibly stupid that it gets great attention, and I find that when you ask people about email overload issues in their company RTA abuse is often a top selection. Everyone agrees that this should be fixed – until you mention removing the button. As soon as you do, people almost go pale; “oh no, you can’t so that!”

Let’s be clear about the meaning of this solution. People will still be able to reply to all; all it takes is cut-and-pasting the addresses from the old to the new message, a couple of seconds’ work. Yet during those two seconds the sender is forced to think: do I really need to copy everybody? The silly RTA messages will not make it through a second’s scrutiny, but even legitimate messages may well have their dist list pruned. This is definitely a Good Thing.

On the negative side, Knowledge Workers tend to work in teams, where the entire team may need to be copied. Admittedly, this may indicate that they should abandon email in favor of a Wiki, Forum, or other platform optimized for team interaction; and even in email they can use a distribution list alias instead of the explicit list, getting around the need to use RTA at all. And still, people resist the idea. Nielsen company, the media research folks, removed RTA across the company last January, resulting in a flurry of discussion and criticism reflected in blog posts and comments to them. Some discussions were more or less balanced, like that on TechCrunch, while others degenerated into outright ridicule, like here (you gotta love the title!). The comments mention some other companies who tried this; for my part I have personal insight into one – a large financial company in Israel where one group did it, with reported positive outcome for the email overload.

Given the controversy, I suppose the solution needs some tweaking; and many ideas come to mind. For instance, the client might be modified to disable RTA only for messages with over (say) 15 recipients; or it could be made to pop an alert – “Did you notice you’re replying to more than 15 people?”, leaving the decision up to the user. This last was one feature of the “Email Effectiveness Coach” Outlook add-on I introduced at Intel some years ago. Lastly, and simplest, is this idea: don’t eliminate the RTA button – simply move it to the far end of the toolbar, away from its usual place next to Reply. Even that might suffice to interfere with the thoughtless click…

Making the case against Information Overload: a resource compilation

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 20, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

Solving Information Overload in an enterprise is difficult enough; but before you ever get there, you need to convince management that they want to solve it. This would seem a no-brainer: managers are the worst hit when it comes to excessive email, so you’d think they’d jump at a proposal to solve the problem; and some, indeed, do. Many, however, fail to realize just how high the price is that their organization pays for the flood of messaging; and when I was working for Intel, whose culture asserts  that Data rules supreme, I had to bring data substantiating that price. If you plan to do something about Information Overload in your own company, you may well need to do the same.

To that end, I can recommend a paper that I and two of my coworkers published in First Monday – a peer-reviewed online journal – in August 2007. Titled “Infomania: why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer”, it describes and classifies the manifold impacts of Information Overload in an organization, and provides footnotes and a bibliography that point the reader at the research papers, surveys and other data that prove and quantify the effects. We wrote this for our own use, to have all the information in one convenient document, and you are welcome to use it to prove your point wherever you are.

If you find this paper useful, let me know by leaving a comment!

Kinds of Information Overload

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 18, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

My own background as a hi-tech cube dweller biases my perception of Information Overload to the aspect that is most immediately painful to engineers and managers in the industry: Email Overload. Indeed, the impact of the scores or hundreds of incoming message these folks receive daily is so painful that they’re seldom aware of the second major kind of overload that is complementary to email: Interruptions, the distracting beeps, bleeps and squawks of mobile phones, Blackberries, and incoming email. In fact, as we’ve computed at Intel, Interruptions are a bigger time sink than email; but they don’t accumulate like mail does, which is shy they are less visible to their victims.

And then there are other kinds of Information Overload, and when I lecture or blog about “my” kind I get comments from people who expected other kinds. For instance, there’s the problem of ability to keep up with published knowledge, typically couched in terms of the medical doctors who can’t keep up with all the new papers published in their field. The 20th century saw the switch from the earlier model of the scientist, the one who knew everything there was to know in all domains, to the specialist who studies only a single narrow field; in the 21st century even a single field is too much. Certainly a problem, especially if you’re the patient with the rare condition whose diagnosis sits at the bottom of the pile of unread journals on your physician’s shelf…

Search for “Information Overload” on Twitter – a fascinating place to search for anything – and you see glimpses of all the other types of IO, which afflict other types of people, from school kids to business people to students to techies… for instance,

  • “Too much studying may result in an acute case of information overload”
  • “information overload! if only my head has a USB port! i would love it! Hehe”
  • “Information overload today, massive amounts of baseball and football… I need more tv’s!”
  • “Intense Anime information overload!”
  • “Email overload; while reading mail on laptop, phone buzzes to deliver more mail!”
  • “headache. information overload (4 hrs of lecture back to back, 1 10-min break).”
  • “Information Overload (RSS, Emails, Social Media, going insane!)”

    • So, for different people IO may mean too many lectures, too much homework, too many TV channels, Social media… rather different phenomena with the same name. And while I will be writing here mostly about the Email/Interruptions kind, I look forward to also discussing some of the others.

    Meanwhile, if you have thoughts about a kind of IO you want me to discuss, share it in the comments and we’ll see!

    My own background as a hi-tech cube dweller biases my perception of Information Overload to the aspect that is most immediately painful to engineers and managers in the industry: Email Overload. Indeed, the impact of the scores or hundreds of incoming message these folks receive daily is so painful that they’re seldom aware of the second major kind of overload that is complementary to email: Interruptions, the distracting beeps, bleeps and squawks of mobile phones, Blackberries, and incoming email. In fact, as we’ve computed at Intel, Interruptions are a bigger time sink than email; but they don’t accumulate like mail does, which is shy they are less visible to their victims.

    And then there are other kinds of Information Overload, and when I lecture or blog about “my” kind I get comments from people who expected other kinds. For instance, there’s the problem of ability to keep up with published knowledge, typically couched in terms of the medical doctors who can’t keep up with all the new papers published in their field. The 20th century saw the switch from the earlier model of the scientist, the one who knew everything there was to know in all domains, to the specialist who studies only a single narrow field; in the 21st century even a single field is too much. Certainly a problem, especially if you’re the patient with the rare condition whose diagnosis sits at the bottom of the pile of unread journals on your physician’s shelf…

    Search for “Information Overload” on Twitter – a fascinating place to search for anything – and you see glimpses of all the other types of IO, which afflict other types of people, from school kids to business people to students to techies… for instance,

    “Too much studying may result in an acute case of information overload”

    “information overload! if only my head has a USB port! i would love it! Hehe”

    “Information overload today, massive amounts of baseball and football… I need more tv’s!”

    “Intense Anime information overload!

    “Email overload; while reading mail on laptop, phone buzzes to deliver more mail!”

    “headache. information overload (4 hrs of lecture back to back, 1 10-min break).”

    “Information Overload (RSS, Emails, Social Media, going insane!)”

    So, for different people IO may mean too many lectures, too much homework, too many TV channels, Social media… rather different phenomena with the same name. And while I will be writing here mostly about the Email/Interruptions kind, I look forward to also discussing some of the others.

    Meanwhile, if you have thoughts about a kind of IO you want me to discuss, share it in the comments and we’ll see!

    Does email really lead to suicide?

    Published
    by
    Nathan Zeldes
    on October 16, 2009
    in Analysis and Opinion
    . 2 Comments

    A few weeks ago there was a spate of blog posts and tweets asking “Does email lead to suicide?”

    At the basis of this were reports that the management of France Telecom was taking action to stave a wave of employee suicides. One of the less sensationalist reports about this is this one, in The Independent; and even this one is titled “Exec: Email is causing killer stress”. So – is it true?

    As to the facts (an oft neglected little matter, facts): turns out that a France Telecom official was commenting on a series of employee suicides in that corporation, which he attributed to employees being stressed:

    Chief Financial Officer Gervais Pellissier told Reuters that workers in all big companies are under more pressure in the age of the BlackBerry. “Today for people working in business, whatever the level, whether they are CEO or even first- or second-rank level employees, they are always connected,” he told Reuters.

    Well, that is very true. However, can we therefore assume that the unfortunate employees took their own lives because of Information Overload? Two other facts come out in the article:

    • The company has been going through a major restructuring, leading to layoffs of some 20% of the workforce; possibly quite a bit more stressing than one’s Blackberry.

    And,

    • “Not all the France Telecom suicides were job-related and it wasn’t immediately clear if the total of 23 over 18 months was more than would be expected normally in a population of 100,000, the size of the company’s French work force. The French suicide rate was 15 per 100,000 people in the entire French population in 2004, the latest available year of data”.

    Now, you don’t need to be a statistics professor to do the math: the suicide rate in that company, however tragic, is identical to the nationwide average!
    I can see how “Does email lead to suicide?” is a catchier headline than “Even layoffs didn’t raise employee suicide rate above normal”… and I do applaud France Telecom management for taking the matter seriously and looking for ways to help their people cope in difficult times, as we are told they have. But what about email?

    Certainly none of the data in the papers shows any convincing connection. I claim no authoritative knowledge here, but personally, I certainly think Information Overload causes stress, which is a bad thing that I’ve devoted years of my life to changing; yet I doubt that its impact on suicide can be significant. There are much worse things in a workplace and in life in general. I also note that life in past centuries, before the invention of the BlackBerry, was also hard and stressful, often in ways far worse than we can grasp today (just try to imagine the life of a French peasant during the 14th century’s wars and plagues, long before France Telecom’s arrival on the scene).

    What do you think?

    The first post

    Published
    by
    Nathan Zeldes
    on October 15, 2009
    in Analysis and Opinion
    . 2 Comments

    And another new blog… like a newborn baby: you have high hopes for it, but you can’t really imagine what it will turn out like. You just have to nurture it as best you can, then wait and see.

    This one is dedicated to the big passion of my interesting career… solving the problem of Information Overload, a.k.a. Infomania or Infoglut. It is an area I’ve been active in since Intel’s switch from VAX terminals to IBM PC’s in the mid-Nineties, which enabled Email Overload to explode in our faces. I had just invented my job as Computing Productivity Manager, and I may very well have been the first person in the corporate world to identify Email Overload as a major issue and to do something about it at an organizational level.

    Over the years I’ve developed and deployed a variety of solutions at Intel and beyond, including behavior change drives, training programs and software tools. Because I like interacting across boundaries, I formed relationships and knowledge exchanges with other researchers and practitioners across the planet, in industry and academia, leading eventually to the founding of the Information Overload Research Group of which I am now the president. Over the years I’ve learned much about the problem, its interesting causes, its impact and the way it may be addressed; also what does and what doesn’t work, and what the critical success factors are. More than enough raw material for a blog, and more keeps coming in as the world begins to awaken to the need to improve a situation that has become nearly impossible.

    My plan is to focus this blog on the aspect of IO that I’m most involved in: the combination of Email Overload and Interruptions that is impacting productivity and quality of life in organizations. There are other aspects of IO that I may touch on occasionally, but less often. However, it will come as no surprise to those who know my non-linear thought process that I will also address other aspects of knowledge work in general, and will enjoy the occasional off-topic foray when something catches my fancy. After all, that’s the wonderful freedom of blogging: my blog, my choice…

    I hope you, my readers, will find all this sufficiently interesting to join the conversation, making this a two-way – heck, a multi-way – conversation. Welcome to my blog!