Archive for December, 2009

Stop hoarding information for a rainy day

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 29, 2009
in Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

Here’s a story from the early nineties, a time when much information in the workplace was stored and moved on sheets of mashed tree pulp.

Back then I was doing research into Artificial Neural Networks, and my coworkers at Intel got into the habit of mailing me (in an inter-office envelope) a copy of any article on the subject that they came across. And I got into the habit of piling the articles at the corner of my desk, so that I might read them one day when I had the time. After all, they were articles in my field of interest, so it made sense that I should read them and become wiser.

Unfortunately, the day when I’d have time never came, and the pile of papers kept growing higher, and my morale went lower in proportion… Still, what could I do but keep the papers? They were in my field of interest, right?! I couldn’t risk missing out on any of them!

Then one day I had an epiphany. I dumped the whole pile in the trashcan and resolved that when that auspicious day  finally came, I would buy the best book on ANN out there and read it instead. After all, the papers were pushed at me without much selection, so the best book was guaranteed to be better. The pile was gone, my morale went up again, and guess what… the day has yet to arrive.

I’m sharing this story because of its clear analogy to today’s information overload. Many people have overflowing Inboxes because they feel they need to receive and keep mailings that are related to their field, even if they lack the time to read them in real time so they just accumulate. They’re afraid to miss out on the wisdom. Yet in reality life is too short to read it all, and one is far better off deleting many FYI messages, however enlightening; if you’re left with bandwidth to spare (yeah, right) you can always put it to better use when it’s you deciding how to apply it. Give it a try and see!

SMS in Banking: no, thank you!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 21, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

I was talking to a friendly young lady on my bank’s telephone access line (a very convenient service, that). After she handled the transaction I needed, she told me in a cheerful voice that I’m entitled to the bank’s new SMS service, which she proceeded to describe.

This great new service would enable me to receive SMS messages right to my mobile phone whenever anything happened in my account: credits, debits, credit card transactions, and so on. Each would blare an alert on my belt. That, I was told, would save me a lot of effort checking what was going on! And, to add to my delight, this cornucopia of interruptions would be free of charge for the first three months!

I told her politely that I have a better deal for her: I’d be willing to pay the bank, if I had to, in order to bar this service from my already hectic life. After all, imagine the irony of me consulting at a client on how to reduce interruptions from SMS and other media in the workplace, and then when the client pays me I get an SMS interruption to announce the arrival of my fee. And, from the fourth month on, presumably another message to announce the debit of the fee I’d pay for this privilege…

I was talking to a friendly young lady in my bank’s telephone access line (a very convenient service, that). After she handled the transaction I needed, she told me in a cheerful voice that I’m entitled to the bank’s new SMS service, which she proceeded to describe.

This great new service would enable me to receive SMS messages right to my mobile phone whenever anything happened in my account: credits, debits, credit card transactions, and so on. Each would blare an alert on my belt. That, I was told, would save me a lot of effort checking what was going on! And, to add to my delight, this cornucopia of interruptions would be free of charge for the first three months!

I told her politely that I have a better deal for her: I’d be willing to pay the bank, if I had to, in order to bar this service from my already hectic life. After all, imagine the irony of me consulting at a client on how to reduce interruptions from SMS and other media in the workplace, and them when the client pays me I get an SMS interruption to announce the arrival of my fee. And, from the fourth month on, presumably another message to announce the debit of the fee I’d pay for this privilege…

Screening after-hours interruptions

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 17, 2009
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

Today’s knowledge workers are normally assumed to be working on company business well after they went home for the night; they are always reachable by cellphone and email. Of course they could turn off their devices when they exit the office, but most are afraid to do so in case of a real emergency, which in our global economy can come at any hour and demand their attention. What can they do?

I was heartened to hear an original solution from a woman who juggles the tasks of managing a group in a high tech company, raising two kids, and having a life. She told me that she simply leaves her computer in the office when she leaves; her coworkers know that she never works at home. However, because her role does involve responding to urgent situations, she makes it known that she’s always available on her cell. But – and here is the twist – if anyone calls her with an urgent action item after hours, she tells them she has no computer with her, so she’ll be happy to drive to the office – which is not far from her home – and deal with matters there. Guess what: 90% of callers beg her to stay at home; the urgency suddenly evaporates and it turns out that the task can wait until morning.

What this smart lady did is put in a filter: she’s really willing to make the trip, but when confronted with this higher threshold of inconveniencing her the callers are forced to make a serious judgment call on whether their need justifies the intrusion. True emergencies make it through this filter; the rest are withdrawn.

Many lessons in this story!

Email overload: snowflakes or terror birds?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 13, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion and Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster.

But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to Hitchcock’s birds. The messages no longer come in passively and lie contented in the Inbox until you’re ready to shovel… they are active and violent, clamoring for your attention, ready to claw at you if you don’t react to them RIGHT NOW! Try and ignore a message for a few hours and the sender will be all over you on your cellphone: haven’t you seen my email?? How dare you not look for it!

This change involves a newer element of Information Overload: the expectation of 24×7 availability and immediate response. I suspect that this is a result of the “Blackberry culture”, which speeded up the pace of doing business, did away with the excuse that “I was away from my computer”, and of course enabled the sender of an email to grab you by a cellular call to complain that you haven’t yet responded to the message they emailed you five minutes ago.

The extent to which this weirdness has infiltrated the email ethic was illustrated vividly when a friend who is an artist tried to apply my teaching of setting a daily time slot for email processing. She set hers after lunch, and was immediately rewarded by angry calls from her correspondents complaining that their morning mail had to wait a few hours. And this is in the art world, not a hospital intensive care unit. Never mind that there is no real need; the expectation of immediacy is pervasive. I was recently treated to a resend of a meeting request for a few weeks in the future, three hours after it came in originally. The admin only wrote in the resend “???” – as if this brief delay was inexplicable and inexcusable.
It seems that the incoming overload is fighting against our efforts to put it in control. Scary!

Tweeting the world

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 8, 2009
in Off-topic
. 1 Comment

One of the nice things about using Twitter is that you get to “meet” interesting people from all over the solar system (yes, yes, all from one planet, for the time being). I was amused, however, to get a message from a person that expressed delight at meeting on Twitter someone from Israel. The Internet is global and universal, after all, a prime expression of the supposedly flat world we live in, and we’re used by now to connect and interact with people from all countries without second thought; and this person told me she has Twitter friends from a list of countries – she was actually happy to “collect” acquaintances from distant lands!

This reminded me of the good ol’ days when I was a ham radio operator. One of the main things we radio amateurs did (when we weren’t building radio gear, anyway) was trying to collect confirmed contacts with as many different countries, regions, continents as we could… the farther the better. There were awards to be won for this, like the DX Century Club, or DXCC, given to anyone who had proof of talking to 100 different countries. And there was great satisfaction in discerning through one’s headphones the faint signal from some distant island or principality, calling the sender and getting a reply to add to one’s growing list. We also relished the conversation, the shared interests, the new friends; but the extra dimension of geographic distribution added to the excitement.

At least one person out there – on my network, too – still feels that excitement!

WorldMap.jpg

Image source: Steph & Adam, under Creative Commons license

Join us at the IORG Quarterly Event on Dec. 9!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 3, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

The Information Overload Research Group’s Online Quarterly Event will take place on

Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 11:30 a.m. EST (16:30 GMT)

The event is open to everyone interested in the topic of Information Overload (at no charge, of course).

This will be a roundtable discussion around the topic “How Does Information Overload Impact You?” moderated by Jonathan Spira, IORG’s VP of research. He will be joined by Prof. Jonathan Ezor, director of the Institute for Business, Law and Technology at Touro.

The format of the meeting gives attendees an opportunity to talk about the personal impact of Information Overload. Please bring your comments, thoughts, and potential solutions with you.

Everyone is welcome to speak!

Click here to register to the event. See you there!