Archive for May, 2010

Do not Disturb!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 30, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

My Nokia E71 smartphone has a selection of available specialized profiles, of which the most useful one is probably “Silent”, for use in meetings and theatres. Useful, yet I use it with trepidation.

I fear the Silent profile because I KNOW, I’m practically certain, that I will forget to turn it off when the meeting is over, only to discover later an accumulation of “missed calls”.

The obvious solution, which seems to elude the good designers at Nokia (and at the makers of every other Smartphone I’ve used to date), is to implement a profile of “silent for one hour”, or maybe “silent for N minutes” with user entry of the duration. This mode would automatically revert to the normal noisy profile after the specified delay.

The same concept applies to software tools that help you stay productive in the face of the endless inflow of information. The notion of a “Do Not Disturb” button that turns off alerts of incoming messages has been around for some years;  and we’re beginning to see tools that apply it. ClearContext, an Outlook add-on that helps one sort through the mail and integrate it into one’s overall time/task management environment, features this button to control email notifications. As the impact of the growing infoglut grows, I expect we’ll see more in this space.

And another thought: in ages past, someone wanting peace and quiet would retire to a convent for a year or a lifetime; in our present hectic era, a tool giving us an hour sans ringtones is the best we can hope for…

My Nokia E71 smartphone has a selection of available specialized profiles, of which the most useful one is probably “Silent”, for use in meetings and theatres. Useful, yet I use it with trepidation.

I fear the Silent profile because I KNOW, I’m practically certain, that I will forget to turn it off when the meeting is over, only to discover later an accumulation of “missed calls”.

The obvious solution, which seems to elude the good designers at Nokia (and at the makers of every other Smartphone I’ve used to date), is to implement a profile of “silent for one hour”, or maybe “silent for N minutes” with user entry of the duration. This mode would automatically revert to the normal noisy profile after the specified delay.

The same concept applies to software tools that help you stay productive in the face of the endless inflow of information. The notion of a “Do Not Disturb” button that turns off alerts of incoming messages has been around for some years; and we’re beginning to see tools that apply it. ClearContext, an Outlook add-on that helps one sort through the mail and integrate it into one’s overall time/task management environment, features this button to control email notifications. As the impact of the growing infoglut grows, I expect we’ll have more in this space.

And another thought: in ages past someone wanting peace and quiet would retire to a convent for a year or a lifetime; in our present hectic era, a tool giving us an hour sans ringtones is the best we can hope for…

At last – a meeting cost calculator!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 24, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 3 Comments

Meetings consume precious time like a SUV guzzles gas. I remember that Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary co-founder, once wrote that you need half a dozen approvals to buy a $5000 copier but can call a meeting of 20 managers – whose time costs far more – without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact is, the time cost of meetings is enormous and usually overlooked.

Now, time spent on a well led, interactive, lively meeting is very well spent; but all too often meetings are long, boring and useless, especially when everyone is doing email… and when they drag on, or get into a rathole, nobody hears the jingle of money rolling down the drain.

Until now. I was delighted when my friend Paul Calame sent me a pointer to the product pictured here: the TIM (Time is Money) Meeting Cost Calculator & Clock.

TIM meeting cost calculator

You set the TIM up by inputting the number of attendees and their average salary, and the display ticks away the dollars, reminding everyone that they’d better stay focused and fast.

This fun product can be found here, and in the spirit of our time it even has a Facebook fan page… and, appropriately enough, you can buy it at the online Dilbert store :-)

Meetings consume precious time like a SUV guzzles gas. I remember that Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary co-founder, once wrote that you need half a dozen approvals to buy a $5000 copier but can call a meeting of 20 managers – whose time costs far more – without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact is, the time consumption of meetings is enormous and usually overlooked.

Now, time spent on a well led, interactive, lively meeting is very well spent; but all too often meetings are long, boring and useless, especially when everyone is doing email… and when they drag on, or get into a rathole, nobody hears the jingle of money rolling down the drain.

Until now. I was delighted when my friend Paul Calame sent me a pointer to the product pictured here: the TIM (Time is Money) Meeting Cost Calculator & Clock.

You set the TIM up by inputting the number of attendees and their average salary, and the display ticks away the dollars, reminding everyone that they’d better stay focused and fast.

This fun product can be found here, and in the spirit of our time is even a Facebook fan page for this product… and, appropriately enough, you can buy it at the online Dilbert store :-)

Yes it IS Information Overload, Clay Shirky, not only Filter Failure

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 18, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 10 Comments

You can see it on Twitter every day, a year and a half after he coined it: Clay Shirky’s famous Filter Failure meme,

“It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”.

It’s catchy. It’s thought-provoking. And yet, I believe, it’s also misleading.

This meme started with an excellent keynote Clay gave at Web 2.0 Expo NY in late 2008, and I strongly recommend you watch the video if you haven’t already: it’s very insightful and interesting. If you’re too overloaded to spend 23 minutes, some of the ideas are also in a CJR interview here.

To sum it up, Clay says Information Overload is not new; it’s been around since antiquity, and really took off with Gutenberg’s printing press. But in the print era, a publisher had to filter what to publish, because it cost them up front and might not sell; this filtered the available information at the source. The Internet introduced “Post-Gutenberg economics”: it’s now possible to publish anything for free, so the filter is gone. Therefore, there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, which we should solve by developing new and better filtering paradigms.

Which makes a lot of sense, except that I’ve spent the past 15 years of my professional life helping knowledge workers who are driven to distraction by a very obvious and real affliction they call Information Overload. So how can Mr. Shirky, a leading expert, say it’s not even a problem?

On one level, it may just be a logical error: just because A is caused by B doesn’t mean that A isn’t a real problem. The Black Death was caused by flea-carrying rats; yet no one would say “It wasn’t a terrible plague, it was a pest-control failure”. It was a very real plague caused by failure to kill the rats; and Information Overload is a very real problem caused (in part) by Filter Failure.

More importantly, I think Clay and I define “Information Overload” – the “It” in the meme – differently. As he states in the CJR article, “[having] more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime… is almost the definition of information overload”. If this is the definition, then I agree it isn’t a problem – and certainly not THE problem – at all. Who cares if there’s a lot of information in a library, as long as you don’t have to read it all?

The problem of Information Overload as I see it, the one that’s robbing millions of people of their productivity, sanity and quality of life, is definitely new, going back to the proliferation of email in the nineties. It is not that there’s a lot of information; it is that there’s a lot more information that we are expected to read than we have time to read it in. It’s about the dissonance between that requirement and our ability to comply with it, and this requirement was not there in Alexandria or in Gutenberg’s Europe: you were free to read only what you wanted to and had time for. This is what has changed, not just the filtering. Take email: the real problem isn’t spam, which is easily dealt with; it’s the scores or hundreds of work-related messages you receive each day, and the fact that replying intelligently to even the fraction that is really important forces many to work late into the night, 7 days  a week. This is an intensely real nightmare for managers, engineers, and many others. And this is why Email Overload is a problem and RSS feed overload is much less so: there is an expectation (express or implied) that you must go through all the mail in your Inbox; there is no such expectation for an RSS reader.

That said, is this problem caused by Filter Failure? To some extent it is: when you had to stuff your mimeographed interoffice memos in envelopes, the inconvenience was a filter; when you got your reprints on paper from the company librarian, that too was a filter. The Reply to All button is a major filter-buster. However, I perceive other causes, as you readers of my blog know. In particular, there are cultural reasons for the abundance of workplace email: CYA, publish or perish, mistrust, escalation, and so on.

So if Clay is simply talking about the “OMG there are so many publications out there I will never read” kind of IO, while I am talking of the “I will never clear this Inbox in time to take my kid to the game” kind, why do I take issue with him? I do so because stating “there is no such thing as information overload” does not make that distinction; it makes it sound like all the people who claim they have an IO  problem are whiners and luddites. It also reduces the motivation to deal with Information Overload, and this leaks over into “my” kind of IO, where such motivation is highly beneficial to people. And lastly, emphasizing that it’s “only” Filter Failure takes attention away from the many solutions that address IO from other angles, such as understanding and changing the underlying workplace culture. Which Clay himself would probably welcome, since he concludes the lecture with the statement that we will need to rethink social norms to fix the issue. Amen to that!

What do you think?

Meetings: Shorter is Better

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 13, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Meetings consume a big portion of the knowledge worker’s week, and are notoriously unproductive (small wonder, what with everybody doing email). Improving meeting effectiveness is therefore a big deal; I’ve seen it done right with great positive impact, and the converse too. It takes some doing… but there is one way meetings can be improved immediately: by abandoning the tyranny of the one-hour slot.

Most meetings in the world are set for an hour or two, simply because we all live by the clock, and it is calibrated in hours. This is also reflected in most calendars, whether paper or software based. And so, most people have their calendar applications set for a default 1-hour meeting duration. I’m sure you’ve never seen an invitation for a meeting from 10:00 AM to 10:38 AM… even if 38 minutes would suffice, you set it for the full hour, then fritter away the remaining time. In addition to losing the “padding” time (which reminds me of the inefficient use of disk space for file storage in blocks, but hey, I’m a techie) – there is another issue: with many people in back to back meetings, there is no gap between meetings – and you do need a few minutes to go from conference room to conference room, or (even if it’s all on the phone) to summarize your notes and collect your thoughts; so meetings tend to begin late.

The solution, of course, is to shorten meetings to less than an hour. I’ve seen a number of approaches here:

  • Some companies simply use a 30 minute slot as the default. This makes for efficient meetings, though it leaves the gap problem unsolved.
  • At Intel we had a policy, driven by senior management, to set meetings for 50 minutes, allowing people to get to the next one in good time. It was not always adhered to, but it had an impact and helped instill a mindset of punctuality.
  • TimeBridge – makers of a wonderful meeting scheduling product I may discuss in a future post – have just announced the “45-Minute Meeting Movement”, an effort to help champion more efficient meetings. They have a blog you may want to keep an eye on; and they’ve made a change in their product by setting the default meeting time in the TimeBridge meeting scheduler to 45 minutes instead of sixty. This formalizes the previous idea, and should help users stay on track.
  • Of course, there’s the story of the company whose CEO had all the chairs removed from the conference rooms… a bit drastic perhaps but definitely conducive to brevity!

If you’ve witnessed other methods, let us know. Any tip in this space can save millions…

Meetings consume a big portion of the knowledge worker’s week, and are notoriously unproductive (small wonder, what with everybody doing email). Improving meeting effectiveness is therefore a big deal; I’ve seen it done right with great positive impact, and the converse too. It takes some doing… but there is one way meetings can be improved immediately: by abandoning the tyranny of the one-hour slot.

Most meetings in the world are set for an hour or two, simply because we all live by the clock, and it is calibrated in hours. This is also reflected in most calendars, whether paper or software based. And so, most people have their calendar applications set for a default 1-hour meeting duration. I’m sure you’ve never seen an invitation for a meeting from 10:00 AM to 10:38 AM… even if 38 minutes would suffice, you set it for the full hour, then fritter away the remaining time. In addition to losing the “padding” time (which reminds me of the inefficient use of disk space for file storage in blocks, but hey, I’m a techie) – there is another issue: with many people in back to back meetings, there is no gap between meetings – and you do need a few minutes to go from conference room to conference room, or (even if it’s all on the phone) to summarize your notes and collect your thoughts; so meetings tend to begin late.

The solution, of course, is to shorten meetings to less than an hour. I’ve seen a number of approaches here:

· Some companies simply use a 30 minute slot as the default. This makes for efficient meetings, though it leaves the gap problem unsolved.

· At Intel we had a policy, driven by senior management, to set meetings for 50 minutes, allowing people to get to the next one in good time. It was not always adhered to, but it had an impact and helped instill a mindset of punctuality.

· TimeBridge – makers of a wonderful meeting scheduling product I may discuss in a future post – have just announced the “45-Minute Meeting Movement”, an effort to help champion more efficient meetings. They have a blog you may want to keep an eye on; and they’ve made a change in their product by setting the default meeting time in the TimeBridge meeting scheduler to 45 minutes instead of sixty. This formalizes the previous idea, and should help users stay on track.

· Of course, there’s the story of the company whose CEO had all the chairs removed from the conference rooms… a bit drastic perhaps but definitely conducive to brevity!

If you’ve witnessed other methods, let us know. Any tip in this space can save millions…

Online Silence and Trust

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 8, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

I lectured at the Info 2010 conference this week, where we had a special track dedicated to Information Overload, with many excellent speakers. One of these was Dr. Yoram Kalman, a key contributor to IORG and a long time friend, who presented his research into Online Silence. This is the phenomenon, so familiar to us all, where you send an email to a person and no reply comes back. After a few days you get restless and resend; often this will remain of no avail. Then you phone the recipient, and perhaps leave a message urging they look for your email in their Inbox…

Yoram has been studying the Chronemics – the behavior in time – of online communications for years; the public release of the Enron email data set allowed him to quantify email behaviors in great detail, which I won’t go into here – you can find his publications on his web site. What I want to point out in this post is the basic concept of Online Silence as a real phenomenon and a major problem in the knowledge work domain.

To my mind, the major impact of Online Silence is how it undermines Trust in virtual teams. Trust is important and fragile even in collocated teams; but in our globalized world – flat in theory, but very spherical where time zones are concerned – we work in teams dispersed around the planet, and then Trust becomes even more critical – and far more fragile. Without being able to look your team mate in the eye, you have to rely to a large extent on indirect evidence of their attitude and commitment. Sending someone an email and not getting a reply certainly doesn’t help build mutual trust; but it can’t even indicate its absence. This is because the silence may indicate anything: perhaps this guy ignores you with malice, even trying to undermine your success; perhaps she saw your message and would love to reply, but she has more urgent work on her plate – not as bad as malice, but still indicative of a rather low opinion of your importance; maybe he just missed seeing your message in the deluge of incoming mail; or possibly they’ll still get to it (but don’t hold your breath – if you didn’t get an answer in a day or so, the chance is low; Yoram’s research shows that clearly).

Since all you can see is the lack of a reply, you really have no way of knowing – and that’s the worst possible state, from a trust perspective. Yet in a world where email overload is rampant, where people get more mail than they can possibly ever respond to, this is the reality. I myself sometimes try to make a “contract” with a colleague I need to collaborate with: let’s commit to always respond to each other’s emails within 24 hours. But sadly, this never seems to work for more than a short time…

I lectured at the Info 2010 conference this week, where we had a special track dedicated to Information Overload, with many excellent speakers. One of these was Dr. Yoram Kalman, a key contributor to IORG and a long time friend, who presented his research into Online Silence. This is the phenomenon, so familiar to us all, where you send an email to a person and no reply comes back. After a few days you get restless and resend; often this will remain of no avail. Then you phone the recipient, and perhaps leave a message urging they look for your email in their Inbox…

Yoram has been studying the Chronemics – the behavior in time – of online communications for years; the public release of the Enron email data set allowed him to quantify email behaviors in great detail, which I won’t go into here – you can find his publications on his web site. What I want to point out in this post is the basic concept of Online Silence as a real phenomenon and a major problem in the knowledge work domain.

The main aspect of Online Silence that I find of interest is how it undermines Trust. Trust is important and fragile even in collocated teams; but in our globalized world – flat in theory, but very spherical when time zones are concerned – we work in teams dispersed around the planet, and then Trust becomes even more critical – and far more fragile. Without being able to look your team mate in the eye, you have to rely to a large extent on indirect evidence of their attitude and commitment. Sending someone an email and not getting a reply certainly doesn’t help build mutual trust; but it can’t even indicate its absence. This is because the silence may indicate anything: perhaps this guy ignores you with malice, even trying to undermine your success; perhaps she saw your message and would love to reply, but she has more urgent work on his plate – not as bad as malice, but still indicative of a rather low opinion of your importance; maybe he just missed seeing your message in the deluge of incoming mail; or possibly they’ll still get to it (but don’t hold your breath – if you didn’t get an answer in a day or so, the chance is low; Yoram’s research shows that clearly).

Since all you can see is the lack of a reply, you really have no way of knowing – and that’s the worst possible state, from a trust perspective. Yet in a world where email overload is rampant, where people get more mail than they can possibly ever respond to, this is the reality. I myself sometimes try to make a “contract” with a colleague I need to collaborate with: let’s commit to always respond to each other’s emails within 24 hours. But sadly, this never seems to work for more than a short time…

Collecting Manifestations of an Obsession

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

Knowing my specialization in Information Overload, people around me tend to share stories from their own observations of people submitting to obsessive reading of email 24×7.

For example: one friend reports being at an airport, seeing a family with young children waiting in line with their luggage on a cart. The mother was holding on to the cart, and trying to keep an eye on the kids. The father was banging on a Notebook doing email… (I can imagine that despite this fine proof of the feminine capacity for multitasking, his wife would have preferred to share the burden with him).

For example: a CEO I know marveled at the time he saw in a restaurant a business man dining with what was clearly a client. Then this guy’s Blackberry buzzed in his pocket, and he attended to it even though the conversation with the client must have been far more important.

For example… but I’m sure you have many examples of your own… let’s collect them! Can you share with the rest of us in the comments? The most outrageous case – and you’re welcome to indicate your choice – gets an honorable mention!