Archive for February, 2010

Information Overload: how do we quantify the cost?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 26, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

We grown-ups like to quantify things in numbers, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry charmingly observes in The Little Prince: “If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!””

So, it is no wonder that any fighter against inefficiency in the workplace is often confronted with the demand for quantification of productivity gains. How much is Email Overload costing our company? How much can we save if we eliminate it, in full or in part? There is no perfect answer to these questions, because knowledge worker productivity is notoriously hard to measure (more on this in a future post). How can you provide a figure?

A common approach is to estimate the time wasted on IO and multiply by the average salary in the company to derive a total cost figure. These figures tend to run very high; Basex, a New York analyst firm, famously placed the cost to the US economy at $900B (yes, Billion) a year, derived from a waste of over a day per week per worker. There are a number of questions this leaves open: how do you quantify the time loss? And what will happen if you recover the time? Will productivity (output per employee) soar, or will people just work less, or go home earlier (not a bad thing in itself, in the long term)?

Then there’s the fact that time loss is just the tip of the iceberg, as I and my colleagues showed in an article a while back. The damages of Info Overload go beyond time waste: working in “Continuous partial attention” reduces creativity and innovation, increases error rates, reduces managerial decision quality, and stresses people to the point of illness. So, focusing on the easier to quantify time loss ignores what may well be higher costs: how do you even begin to measure the cost of not having come up with a critical invention? How do you assess the long term effect of employee burnout?

My own approach is to avoid a dollar figure, and instead I always share with my audiences and clients the full picture. I give the time loss – in hours, not dollars – as a lower limit;  we know enough to have a fairly good idea of that number. If their employees are wasting about a day per week, you don’t need the math to realize it would be a good idea to plug this time sink. Then I explain the other loss areas one by one, with enough research data to give the listener an idea of the problem’s magnitude, rather than a dollars and cents number. This way, I find, people tend to “get it” without sidetracking into secondary arguments.

What would you say? Is this more or less effective than attempting a precise calculation?

Knowledge Management Forum off to a good start

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 22, 2010
in Off-topic
. 1 Comment

Spent the day at the inaugural unconference of the  Israel Knowledge Management forum. This forum started  some years ago as a very informal gathering of interested professionals on the front porch of founder Yigal Chamish, and  is now making the tricky transition into a formal non-profit association.

I was pleased to observe a well-attended conference, with some 130 attendees and many interesting parallel sessions. There was much networking, including via twitter (#KMISR10); I saw many familiar faces and many new ones. Importantly, attendees included seasoned veterans and young new members, and representation from organizations of every size, flavor and sector.

So, I conclude, the new organization is off to a good start, and ready to tackle the challenges it is certain to face. If you are into KM and in Israel, check the forum out here and consider joining and influencing!

Oh, and what is an un-conference? That’s what it was called, to emphasize the focus on interaction and informal discussion as opposed to passive frontal lectures (of which there were none).

Email and the two aspects of the Paper Trail

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 17, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

One of the well known reasons why people create lots of unnecessary email in an organization is that they want to create a paper trail – written proof that they did something, or said something, or objected to something, so that at a later time they can assert that they did so when someone tries to shift some blame to them.

Of course this is a symptom of a dysfunction in the organizational culture they work in; in a properly run operation there would be no unfair finger pointing, one’s word would be proof enough, and people could focus on productive work instead of covering their behinds. Lucky are the few who actually work in such a place; in most workplaces there is enough mistrust to make the paper trail a sensible, if deplorable, precaution.

So I found it interesting to learn of a manager who was taking the opposite approach, in a sense. This gentleman never replied to emails requiring him to make decisions; he would talk to the requester instead. The reason, evidently, was that in this manner he couldn’t be held to any promises or commitments he made – they were never in writing. In essence, here was a guy who avoided email because it creates a paper trail!

So – some people overuse email in order to create a paper trail, others avoid email in order not to create one – how come? It seems to have to do with your relative position in the pecking order. It you’re down in the trenches, a written record is more often than not in your interest; if you’re higher up in management you may prefer to be free from the attendant accountability. And if you’re in the middle, you may use email upwards and the spoken word downwards…

One of the well known reasons why people create lots of unnecessary email in an organization is that they want to create a paper trail – written proof that they did something, or said something, or objected to something, so that at a later time they can assert that they did so when someone tries to shift some blame to them.

Of course this is a symptom of a dysfunction in the organizational culture they work in; in a properly run operation there would be no unfair finger pointing, one’s word would be proof enough, and people could focus on productive work instead of covering their behinds. Lucky are the few who actually work in such a place; in most workplaces there is enough mistrust to make the paper trail a sensible, if deplorable, precaution.

So I found it interesting to learn of a manager who was taking the opposite approach, in a sense. This gentleman never replied to emails requiring him to make decisions; he would talk to the requester instead. The reason, evidently, was that in this manner he couldn’t be held to any promises or commitments he made – they were never in writing. In essence, here was a guy who avoided email because it creates a paper trail!

So – some people overuse email in order to create a paper trail, others avoid email in order not to create one – how come? It seems to have to do with your relative position in the pecking order. It you’re down in the trenches, a written record is more often than not in your interest; if you’re higher up in management you may prefer to be free from the attendant accountability. And if you’re in the middle, you may use email upwards and the spoken word downwards…

How info-starved were our ancestors?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 14, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is?

First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of the population was close to illiterate, so many people back then had no use for the printed word, pulling the average down. But they had other information, which was not to be found in books: even the humblest peasant acquired a wealth of information in his lifetime – from how to gauge the best time to plant his field to how to efficiently skin a rabbit, two items that would baffle the vast majority of New Yorkers today (to be fair, the latter also have a good deal of such “tacit knowledge” – how to program a VCR, if anyone still does, for example – that is also absent from the Sunday paper).

But let’s limit ourselves to educated people. Did Newton, or Galileo, or Leibniz, or Descartes, or Shakespeare, or their other cultured contemporaries, access less information in their entire life than fills a single issue of our daily paper?

I haven’t studied the matter rigorously, and I’d love to know if anyone had – but it sounds quite dubious to me even when taken literally in terms of bits and bytes. After all, those old timers invariably did have access to the bible, and I doubt the NYT has more text in it than that venerable book, even if you include the advertising. And when you get right down to it, you also have to consider the value of the information. The phone directory is full of information, after all, yet no one would compare it to Newton’s Principia Mathematica (which was a good deal thinner). And, though more interesting than the white pages, the NYT is no match for the bible either.

Bottom line, unless we measure “information” in the most literal-minded and meaningless way, we should rethink the statement about those poor ancestors: they had plenty of access to intelligent, useful, valuable information that served them well. And they had one major advantage over us: the signal to noise ratio in the information they had was much, much better than what we suffer at present. They actually had to walk (or ride) to get their information in printed form; and it cost them good money. As a result, they only tended to access what they could actually read, chosen by them for its value. By contrast, we have information pushed at us in huge quantities through the Internet, and for free; and most of us lack the self control to filter it properly. That is where the real problem of Information Overload comes from, not the length of the daily paper. One look at my Inbox, and I can’t help but envy Isaac Newton, sitting quietly under his apple tree, thinking, with less information than that in a single edition of the NY Times.

Five ways to prevent gaffes in email

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 8, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

The horror stories abound. A careless click on Send, and incalculable damage befalls a sensitive business deal or workplace relationship. Or the sender can become a joke. Or worse.

This is not new; even before email, a careless letter could do much damage if it fell into the wrong hands, or was written in haste. I still keep a mimeographed letter sent by the HR manager of a company to all its employees, where his typist dropped a single letter in the phrase “To: all employees”. Unfortunately for him, this was in Hebrew, and the accidentally misspelled phrase read “To: all slaves” (I kid you not!).

But email is worse than paper mail, much more prone to destructive faux pas. There are a number of reasons:

  • Email overload is such that one tends not to put much careful thought into any one message.
  • Email is far easier to send to large distribution lists.
  • Email can be forwarded very easily to unintended parties.
  • The old paper letters had built in delays: they required drafting, typing, proofing, folding, putting in an envelope, stamping, carrying to the mail drop… all allowing the sender to rethink.

So, how can you avoid sending emails you’ll regret? My suggestions:

  1. Think before you type. That is a generally useful idea, of course… and oft overlooked.
  2. Re-read after you type. In addition to allowing you to refine what you’re trying to say, this will catch typos and those hilarious spellchecker glitches.
  3. Never answer an email when you’re angry or agitated about it. Sleep on it first!
  4. Make it a habit to double-check your addressee list before clicking Send. This is a good time to remove unneeded recipients (reducing their email overload); and it also allows you to detect any wrong addresses, such as ones resulting from mis-typed auto-completed contacts, or a thoughtless Reply-to-All. Take special care with people from other organizations whose addresses may go unnoticed among your own coworkers.
  5. Lastly, I strongly recommend you set your email program to delay a little before sending out mail, so you can change your mind after hitting Send. In Outlook, you can do this by setting a rule to delay all sent messages (see here). However, this is hard to override if you have an urgent message to push out. To solve this, you can schedule periodic Send/Receive operations (see here); in this way you can still manually hit Send/Receive when you want instant sending (the disadvantage of this method is that a small fraction of messages – those sent just before the scheduled synchronization – will not be delayed).

Murphy is still lurking out there, but by following these tips you may be able to keep his laws at bay.

If you have any more ideas (or horror stories) please share them in the comments!

Who stole our reading time?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 3, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Impact and Symptoms
. 4 Comments

Novelist Alan Bissett wrote a fascinating post in The Guardian’s books blog, titled Who stole our reading time?

It points out explicitly what we all experience: we read less today than ever before. And I’m not complaining about the young generation; I’m comparing now and then within the same generation, whether mine or Bissett’s (who is about a generation younger than me). The basic observation is that nobody has the time, or the will, or the ability, to finish books the size of War and Peace anymore; or to read the voluminous classics of centuries past at all. Bissett links this to the flood of entertainment options, whether TV, gaming, or the Internet; as he says, “A leisure time that was already precious has been chewed into by text-messaging, Facebook and emails. Almost everyone I speak to claims that they “love books but just can’t find the time to read”. Well, they probably could – they’re just choosing to spend it differently.”

The problem, Bissett opines, is that this has dire consequences for our collective intellect, because it steers our mental development in a limited direction: “Sustained concentration on the printed word, whether in-depth argument or fictional narrative, creates a particular cerebral event which visual-dependent media cannot.”

Read the post to form your own opinion. For my own part, I still consider myself an avid bookworm, but this definition is beginning to lose plausibility – I read so much less than I voraciously used to before. It may or may not have dire consequences, but it is a sad change for me personally. Yet another impact of the new century’s rampant Information Overload.