Archive for January, 2010

Leave your Blackberries at the door!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 29, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 1 Comment

Blackberries and other Smartphones have On/Off switches, and the ability to put them in Silent or Vibrate modes; yet few people have the presence of mind, or willpower, or even awareness, to use these capabilities when entering a location where the ringing and buzzing may be harmful – notably classrooms and meetings. Something stronger is required, and I saw it recently.

I went to give a workshop to a management staff at a large company, and I observed a delightful act of conscious control: when going into the room, everyone left their phones on a table at the door, placing each device on a piece of paper with the owner’s name on it to avoid confusion upon retrieval. Clearly this was standard practice with this staff; they, or their manager, had decided to put an end to handheld interruptions and surreptitious email checking, to enable a distraction-free meeting. Wayda go!…

I certainly recommend any team consider such a standard of behavior; all it takes is a firm manager and some peer pressure. One team that isn’t awaiting my advice is a team of some importance – US president Barack Obama’s cabinet. You can see here a photo of their hi-tech system for marking the devices, which must be left in a basket before entering the meetings. If they can do it, so can you!

The early bird gets nowhere

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 23, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms and Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.

The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…

You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.

People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.

The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…

You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.

Clarity in TLA land

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 18, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 2 Comments

Three letter acronyms (TLAs) are all over the corporate world; it would take an anthropologist (or perhaps a historical linguist) to track their evolution and speciation in the diverse niches of the organizational landscape. One could argue that they are of benefit in reducing writing and reading time (and the destruction of rainforest); on the other hand, a large company has so many acronyms that a dictionary is required (and in some companies, provided) to keep track of their meanings, which tend to be quite complex, and of their origins, which may be almost forgotten. I sometimes spend an idle moment in the middle of a boring meeting by imagining what Isaac Newton, or William Shakespeare, would make of the acronym-laden slides being presented: they would be quite a mystery to them!

And so, I was delighted when, while  visiting a technology company recently, I saw posters on the walls that described some product plans and the like. Each poster had a legend at the bottom which gave the expansion of every acronym it used into English (some perhaps still unintelligible to the eternal bard, but certainly understandable by an outsider).

Let clarity reign!

Preemptive Escalation and Email Overload

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 13, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

Being Preemptive is usually good: for example, preemptive maintenance beats reactive repair any day, right? But recently I encountered an organization where people were using Preemptive Escalation.

What was going on is that when someone sent a coworker an email asking them to do something, the recipient’s boss would be added to the message, as pressure on the recipient to respond. Of course escalation – letting the boss know that someone is unresponsive – is an old device, and a useful one; but usually it is a second level method, applied after the direct message had failed to achieve its aim. Putting the boss on the original message may be effective too, but it means that the managers were getting a lot of extra mail that in many cases would have been unneeded.

But then, slow response always creates added email load as people frantically resend their messages hoping to elicit a reaction. It’s just that usually it’s the unresponsive person that gets “punished”, not their innocent manager…

Telemarketing and Interruptions

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 7, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 3 Comments

Telemarketers are one of the annoyances we all live with, and contribute their part to the overall flow of interruptions that it damaging our ability to concentrate on what we want to do. I find it interesting that these days, at any rate here in Israel, these rascals are following in the footsteps of our work-related information overload into the evening hours.

Today I got two calls in my evening – one from a  car rental company stating its desire to improve its service to me (actually, they simply wanted to verify my contact information) and one from a health provider whom I cut short before learning what they wanted. The first came at 7:12 PM; the second well after 8:00 PM. Someone was paying the poor agents doing these calls to work an after-work-hours shift so they could annoy me in my own after-hours time.

Many of us are used to take this kind of intrusion from our peers at work, unfortunately; but for our service providers to send total strangers to obliterate our private time really takes nerve. And why are they doing this? Obviously, because they figure that’s when they can find us at home, at our listed numbers that they dredge up from the white pages. It makes perfect sense – once society accepts that there is no such thing as a sacrosanct personal time. As our society, the world over, has done… :-(

And now, Undersea Cellphone Interruptions

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 2, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

We’ve heard how man-made noise pollution from ship propellers and sonar disturbs the lives of whales and damages their famous whale song communications. It seems that underwater distractions and interruptions are now destined to affect humans as well…

I saw this while flipping pages in the ubiquitous SkyMall magazine on a plane: an ad for a NEW! Underwater cellular phone system. It leads with the question “Have you ever wanted to make or receive a phone call underwater?” Why, of course! Happens to all of us, all the time! What the ad  doesn’t ask, perhaps because it assumes this is a non-issue for the ordinary citizen, is “Would you pay $1790 to solve this nonexistent problem?”

Underwater Cellphone System ad

Underwater Cellphone System ad

Note that they aren’t targeting James Bond type spies with special needs and budgets to match. This is for the man in the street, as evidenced by the statement that this is useful not only at a tropical reef, but also “in your pool”. Which would save you all the hassle of popping your head out of the water and picking up your cellphone where you left it on your poolside chair.

From an Information Overload standpoint, the tragedy is that you ought not to even take your cellphone when going on vacation in the tropics, much less be willing to answer it while observing the wonders of marine life. But then, if you did that how could your wife call you to ask that you pick up some calamari on your way up out of the depths?

Happy 2010, folks!