Archive for November, 2009

So, is a Blackberry a pro or con for WLB?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 29, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

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I was interviewed by a journalist about Information Overload recently and she asked whether I agree that having a smart phone helps people to balance work and home life?

My first reaction would be “yes, if you use it wisely”. After all, when we deployed Notebook computers at Intel in the mid-nineties it was eminently obvious that they can be a boon for one’s Life: instead of staying late at the office to finish your work, you could take it home to do after dinner, with the kids safely in bed… and of course, Notebooks enabled Telecommuting, which (at a carefully defined one-day-a-week rate) became a major improvement in WLB. Blackberries are just little computers, so wouldn’t they, too, improve the balance?

But on second thought, I had to admit to myself that that isn’t the case. Smartphones are certainly a good thing for many purposes, and they do allow you to remain connected in some cases that would otherwise require you to remain tethered to the office (even if only a home office). It’s easy to imagine scenarios where a Smartphone would give you freedom that you value as increasing WLB. Unfortunately, they can and do go too far, beyond the optimum; that is, any gain they provide in flexibility is offset by the constant intrusiveness and expectation of 24×7 instant response. These miracles of engineering bring powerful benefits, which I use and value, but their distracting impact is too damaging.

The sad part is, you could have the best of both worlds; all it takes is an intelligent strategy and the willpower to enforce it. My Nokia E71 is set up not to notify me of incoming email; that alone solves a large part of the problem. And I usually let it go to voicemail if it gets a call while I’m in a meeting. No rocket science is involved; you could do this today. You’d also need to make sure your correspondents and organization accept this behavior; once it does, you can have a Blackberry without impacting your Life and your Family’s.

One day I’ll tell you about that little switch with the magic symbol on it…

Information Overload and Haute Cuisine

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on November 27, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

We tend to think of Information Overload in a knowledge work context – business offices, hi-tech, and the like. But my friend Rich Poliak was in the restaurant business for a while, and he gave me a fascinating glimpse of the situation between the kitchen and the dining hall.

It turns out that everyone in his restaurant – the Chef, the line cooks, the servers and he himself – were often checking messages, texting and posting on Facebook, Twitter, etc. He attempted to place a policy of no cellphone use during work hours except for breaks, but it was difficult to enforce; in particular, the younger staff has grown up in a constantly connected and constantly interrupted world, and were having difficulty giving this up.

I asked Rich for more detail on how this was impacting the business. In his words:

Part of the challenge of running a restaurant is that the staff in the FOH (Front Of House) – servers, managers, etc. – must be constantly scanning the room to be able to greet newly arriving customers, thank customers who are leaving, respond to customers that have questions, and removing plates, pouring water, wine, etc. They must also be looking back to the kitchen for food that needs to be delivered, answer any questions about special orders, needs, etc. In other words, in fine dining restaurants the employees have to be constantly aware of what is going on all around them to be able to deliver a great customer experience. So if their heads are down reading their cellphones, they can’t do their basic job well.

The same is true for the BOH (Back Of House): although to a different set of areas that they need to pay attention. Line cooks often have up to a dozen or more dishes in process so their attention must be complete otherwise they can under/over cook a dish which is either thrown away… or worse, delivered to a customer…

Many restaurants basically forbid the use of cellphones during the employee’s shift. While this can be effective it also makes the workplace more challenging as people’s expectations of what they are used to continue to evolve. I have to imagine that there are many service jobs where this can be a challenge.

So now we know: it isn’t just knowledge workers. Until someone invents new brains that can text and look for a customer with a fly in their soup (heaven forbid!) at the same time, the problem of interruptions and distractions will continue to affect a much wider scope of workplaces.

If you have more examples to share, speak up!

Mobile phones and parenting

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on November 22, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

The impact of handheld devices on our social lives is visible enough; we all see people stop in the middle of a conversation to answer a ringing mobile phone. We’re even becoming used to it, willing to forgive this rather rude behavior. But there is one category of such interruptions where the rudeness is inexcusable, and that is where the affected party isn’t a “consenting adult”: we also interrupt our interaction with our children.

The Wall Street Journal carried a wonderful article titled “Blackberry orphans” a few years ago that discussed in some detail how the toll on parental attention – already scarce in our workaholic age – is affecting the kids, and how the little rascals fight back. The true story of the little girl that flushed her mom’s Blackberry down the toilet is unforgettable. And the other day I saw a movie that reminded me that it isn’t only little kids that need attention. This was “Comme une image” (renamed “Look at me” in the English world), which deals with the relationship of a 20 year old woman (who is overweight and under-confident) with her father, a famous and rather unpleasant novelist who pays her no attention. Director Agnes Jaoui (who also acts in the movie) used cellular phone interrupts almost incessantly throughout the movie, adding a dimension of hustle and bustle, and neatly conveying an aspect of the alienation of the daughter by her busy and insensitive father.

In centuries past, too, some parents were inaccessible to their kids; but then it was probably more along the lines of “Leave Daddy alone, he’s reading his morning paper“, or “Shhh! Mother has a headache!“… In this 21st century, by contrast, we take the headache and the work with us wherever we move, 24 by 7. Oh, brave new world!

The difference between Tips and Rules

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 17, 2009
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

A common practice in companies that try to reduce information overload is to provide to employees guidelines promoting proper e-mail etiquette (where by etiquette I mean crafting messages to be less disruptive, and more beneficial, to others: “Write clear subject lines” is about etiquette; “only process email twice a day” is not). These guidelines, though usually not sufficient to solve the problem, are certainly a useful component in a solution program; but it’s important to be crystal clear about their classification: are they Tips or Rules?

To illustrate:

Tip: Make your messages as short as possible.

Rule: No message in our company may exceed one screenful of text, unless it has a Management Summary at the top.

Tip: Avoid mailing to unduly large distribution lists.

Rule: Sending a message to “All Employees” requires approval from the Employee Communications coordinator.

Get it? A Tip, however beneficial, is optional; it’s a piece of heartfelt good advice. It can’t be enforced, since it can’t really be measured (because who is to say what “unduly large”, or “short”, means?) A Rule, by contrast, is well defined and carries the authority of an edict.

The authority of Rules may come from the usual management structure – if the CEO decides that there will be no message beyond a certain length, that carries weight – but it can also come from a group “contract”, agreed to by the entire team in question and enforced by mutual expectations and peer pressure (“constructive feedback”, in corporate parlance).

The reason I write this here is because many managers confuse the two types of guidelines. Both have their use, but it is important that management be aware which is which, and what to expect of either kind. Setting a Rule is an added responsibility: you have to enforce it, or you’ll undermine your credibility. You also must make certain that it applies in all foreseeable cases, so nobody is forced to break it to get their job done. It is therefore best to pick only a few Rules and defend them vigorously. Tips are less formal and can be more numerous; their effect depends not on enforcement but on education and role modeling.

And whatever guidelines you use, here is a

Tip: Make sure they make good sense!

The way we were: messaging before the email overload era

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 13, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

A friend in a US Hi-tech company once commented to me that all this business communication that is manifesting itself as email overload is nothing new: we also had this in the days before email, even if it used paper instead of computer screens. We called it Correspondence, he said. And then he added: We devoted a couple of hours a week to it; the rest of the time, we worked…

The difference, of course, is that then, it took two hours a week, where today – the data shows – it takes ten times as much. That’s the problem. Pre-electronic work mail came in interoffice envelopes and via ordinary snail mail. It had to be written, read and answered, just like email. So why did it take so much less time?

Some obvious reasons:

  • Paper mail isn’t free. It needs to be stamped (if external) and it costs to move it around. Email is practically free, as far as the sender is concerned.
  • Paper mail was harder to generate. You had to write it on paper, then typically have an admin type it on a typewriter, proof it, wait for corrections, and so on.
  • Paper mail was hard to send to large distributions. You could have the typist generate a few carbon copies using carbon paper (CC!), but they became less legible the more you wanted; above 3-4 you had to photocopy them, and each had to be addressed separately in an envelope of its own.
  • There was a general expectation that you would do all this only when it was necessary.

To illustrate, consider the analog of forwarding a joke to 50 coworkers. Today, this takes a couple of clicks. In the 1970′s you would need to photocopy 50 copies of the joke, stuff them in 50 envelopes, write addresses on them all, and carry the pile to the mail room (where a few eyebrows would be raised, you can be sure). You can bet nobody would do that, not even if it were the best joke in the world – for the best reason there is, the selfish aversion to make great efforts with no worthwhile return.

The innocent days of yesteryear…

A fine distinction about Multitasking

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 9, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 3 Comments

A common fallacy I encounter repeatedly is that people – at any rate, the younger ones – are able to “Multitask”, that is, attend to multiple actions at once. Since the problem of interruptions in the workplace (and beyond) is a major component of Information Overload, this fallacy is supposed to be comforting. Unfortunately, it is a myth (to borrow from the succinct title of Dave Crenshaw’s book, The myth of multitasking).

Discussing the subject with a friend, she made the point that what people are really doing when they “multitask” is spend some minutes doing one thing, then spend some on another, then on a third (and, I can add from data from Prof. Gloria Mark in UC Irvine, they often don’t get back to the first task until the next day). This sounded familiar, and then it hit me: the mode we were talking about is Preemptive Multitasking, a widely used computing paradigm. This allows the computer to serve many software programs “at once” by allocating very short time slices to them in turn, without asking the interrupted program’s permission. And this may seem like multitasking, but actually it is inefficient because the processing unit has an overhead as it takes care of switching between contexts – much as humans take a 20-40% hit in cumulative time to task completion when they “multitask”.

And what we’d really like to see is a completely different paradigm: we’d love to have brains that are capable of true parallel computing, like today’s multi-core microprocessor chips and like the massively parallel supercomputers out there. Unfortunately, although the brain is massively parallel in many senses – it can process visual data in parallel, and it can keep us breathing while we play chess, for instance – it is not parallel where different cognitive tasks are concerned; it can’t play chess and compose a poem at once, It can’t write two documents at once, and it can’t make quality decisions while reacting to endless incoming email messages at the same time – not without that 20-40% switching overhead.

We are stuck with time sharing brains, not multi-core parallel processors… and we just need to accept this and optimize our behavior accordingly!

How much information?

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on November 5, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

Am in the US, where I gave a lecture in an interesting conference called “Information Growth. Is it what you think it is? – How much information 2009 summit”, organized by the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD. The summit was held to present first results from the “How Much Information?” (HMI) research program, which is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven hi-tech companies.

The research program works to quantify the amount of information that flows into the homes and workplaces of people in this day and age, and to understand how it is divided between different modalities (Cable, Live TV, Radio, Computer data, Books, Videogames, etc); and how all this changes over time. This was an interesting experience, because it addresses the flood of information from a rather different perspective than my usual one. Of course, that’s why I was invited to speak there: to give a different POV. My talk was called “All information is not created equal”, and it looked at different aspects of what makes the information – any information – more or less valuable, and in some cases outright harmful, to the end users that consume it.

Meanwhile I had fascinating discussions with other attendees, and took in much new knowledge. The actual amounts of information being delivered, stored and consumed are huge, thanks in large part to video and gaming content; the average American consumes 34 Gigabytes of information per day. The raw numbers are of interest to hardware and networking manufacturers; but the implications to individuals and to society are perhaps even more interesting. Understanding where the time “saved” from declining book reading goes, how different age groups differ in their information consumption patterns, and how the “digital divide” is penalizing people lacking ready access to this digital feast, are just some of the important questions involved. Expect some of the insights of the day, once I digest them more fully, to appear in future posts on this blog.

Oh, and I also went to see the Babbage Difference Engine in action at the Computer History Museum…

Email Overload and The Little Prince

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on November 2, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

Email Overload is one affliction that people accept more or less willingly. Nobody’s holding a gun to their head, after all. So why are knowledge workers doing this to themselves?

We’ll be discussing many causes in this blog, but today I want to probe a remark made by a friend: he observes many knowledge workers who feel that getting lots of email enhances their status. Basically they’re saying “Watch me – I’m important, I get lots of mail and I’m busy handling all of it!”

This absurd position reminds me of a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s immortal “The Little Prince”. It describes the planetoid of the businessman; the one who sits day and night at his desk, adding up numbers of stars he claims to own. Obviously he gains nothing, but he is so full of himself because he’s busy, as behooves a serious businessman; he takes pride in not having a free moment: “can’t stop… I have so much to do! I am concerned with matters of consequence!” The prince, who is so attuned to the really important things in life, would never understand this viewpoint; one suspects he’d never own a blackberry either (but he did have a rose, and a sheep in a box, remember).

Businessman from The Little Prince

The notion that people would prefer to appear busy doing something that clobbers their ability to create real value is sad; but then, humans do many sad things, some of them more harmful than this one. In any event, I’d like to know: do you see this phenomenon around you? Or – be honest – do you see it in the mirror perhaps? Do tell!