Archive for June, 2010

Facebook and Email Overload reduction

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 28, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

Of course Facebook can do a lot of different things for different people; and different people eye it with enthusiasm, hostility, and anything in between. Some say it can consume hours each day, and thus reduce your productivity; others say it will eventually replace email in the workplace (as it is already in process of doing in the world of Gen Y and those who want to communicate with them). We’ll see in the interesting next few years…

For my part, I find Facebook a pleasant way to keep in touch – lightly – with my friends. My personal strategy is to use LinkedIn for work-only contacts, and Facebook for people I know in person: friends and family. I don’t spend hours on it daily – more like five minutes – but it does alert me to news from my wider circle of friends: who’s had a baby, who is relocating to another land, who is vacationing where and what they saw there that they want to share… and all this in a fun, interactive way, with the full benefits of a true Social Network.

But in addition to the fun part, the migration to Facebook may have a serious role to play in getting in control of information overload. As more of this personal knowledge transfer moves to Facebook, it will stay out of the overused, abused, battered and stressful email Inbox. Most of the jokes, links and recommendations that my many friends used to send me via email in past years seem to have gone to the much less demanding Facebook update stream, where they can be consumed – or not – much less formally.


What is your experience with this?

How to avoid email mania without annoying your customers

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 18, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

Here is a question I was asked by an attendee at one of my lectures. I was teaching the importance of not using email like Instant Messenger, of reading it only a few times a day in preset slots. The guy wanted to know how can he do this, when his customers expect him to respond instantly? Won’t they be annoyed (to use a mild term)? He would prefer to suffer than to upset his customers!

He certainly had a point. In my experience if you cut your email reading just like that, cold turkey, some of your correspondents will in fact go ballistic: What? You received my email ten minutes ago and haven’t already replied!?!? Interestingly, this has nothing to do with urgency; you’ll get this response whether you’re a brain surgeon on call or a student on vacation. So what can you do?

The answer is, you don’t “Just do it”; you plan it and communicate it and make provision for the obsessive expectations of Blackberry-toting colleagues. At a minimum, if you expect an adverse reaction, you can put in your sig a blurb like: “In the interest of staying sane and productive, I only read email twice a day; I try to reply within one business day”.

That approach may placate some of your customers – after all, they have a direct interest in your staying productive for their benefit! But there will always be the slightly hyperactive types who react with “OMG, what if I need this guy urgently? What if my life/business/happiness depended on his seeing my message right away?!” For these, you need to do one more thing: provide a method to reach you immediately in urgent cases. This should be a bit more laborious than clicking “Send”, to prevent its abuse; but the customer will feel much better if they know that should they need you immediately, they won’t be frustrated.

The simplest method of doing this is to provide a cellular phone number to these people, either on a one by one basis or simply by including it in your sig. You may also need to clarify to them that they should feel free to use the phone (you’ll be surprised, but not all people feel OK with that). A more sophisticated method is provided by the elegant solution called AwayFind, which you can see here. You sign on to use it, and then you add to your sig something like “I check email twice daily; to reach me sooner, click here: https://awayfind.com/johnsmith”. Clicking the link takes your correspondent to a web form where they fill a brief message; you will be notified of this to your cellphone immediately. Away Find does a lot more than that – it allows you to configure it to alert you of incoming email that you do need to know of immediately, based on various criteria, so you too can have peace of mind while staying away from the 24×7 mail checking addiction.

So, to sum it up: read your mail in batch mode in preset slots, and give your customers, bless them, a workaround for really urgent stuff. That way you are happy and effective, and they can still get to you as needed. If they can’t accept that, maybe you picked the wrong customers?

Reading email or Understanding email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 12, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms and Individual Solutions
. 4 Comments

Considering the amount of time we all spend reading incoming email, it’s amazing how little we understand what we read.

That reading and understanding are two different things is clear; this is why legal documents use verbiage like “I confirm that I have read and understood the terms & conditions bla bla bla”… but it’s amazing how easy it is to read a mail message and totally miss large chunks of it. People glance at the message, form an impression of what it means to them, and move on – after all, they may have 100 others waiting to be read. The outcome is a degradation of communications that leads to many more messages as people try to fix the mess.

A common manifestation of this is the fact that nobody seems to respond to more than one action request per message. If the sender asks them three questions, a response to the first one is far more likely than having them all reacted to. The sender then sends an additional message to demand the remaining requests be filled, adding to the Infoglut.

There are practical implications: if you want someone to react to a number of queries or tasks, either send them in separate messages (preferable, unless they’re all related to the same matter), or put them in a clearly numbered list format, with the subject of the message stating “Three questions for you” or the like.

Another outcome of reading blindly is that people may jump to the wrong conclusion about the sender’s intent or attitude; many a gaffe has resulted from such mis-reading. It helps if you’re in the habit of delaying angry responses… what seemed as an insult at first glance may turn out to be quite appropriate once the context is clear.

And of course, you increase your chance of having your messages understood and acted on if you keep them short, clear and to the point. But that – writing a well-phrased letter – is one of those lost liberal arts…

Five characteristics of Information Overload in Small Businesses

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 6, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 4 Comments

Last week I lectured on Information Overload at a seminar for small business entrepreneurs. This is a very diverse, lively and interesting population segment, brimming with energy and originality. I had an interesting time talking to people making a living from areas as different as marriage (and, alas, divorce) counseling, organic food production, web site development, optometry, software coding and interior design. These people were young and old, male and female, technically trained or not; but they had one thing in common: all were victims of massive Information Overload.

Which is strange, in a way: you’d think someone running a small home-based business would be less affected than a corporate cube dweller. And yet there they were, expressing the same struggles and losing battles against overflowing Inboxes as any hi-tech engineer or manager.

And yet, there are subtle differences, so I tried to understand and address in my lecture the specific aspects of the problem in a small or home business setting. Below I list what I came up with, and I seek your input to extend or modify this list:

  • In an enterprise, where most email is internal, you have access to – and control of – both senders and recipients, so you can set expectations for both, and train the senders to write effective emails. This is important because by dealing with a sender you can cure the problem at the source. In a small business you don’t have any control of the people who send you email, all you can do is cope better with the symptoms they generate.
  • Small businesspeople face serious issues with Time Management, which these days is closely linked to Email and the Tasks it brings with it. The greater flexibility they enjoy comes with greater opportunities for losing track of time.
  • In addition to Email Overload, these workers perceive a serious problem with how to stay professionally updated without spending all day at it. Of course we all seek knowledge online, but  in a company there is the supporting framework of a formal training curriculum; at home you’re on your own, and the endless content of the blogosphere, just a mouse click away, is hard to resist.
  • Some Small Businesses actually suffer from Spam, I was surprised to learn. This is because they don’t have the protection afforded corporate users by the filters installed at the gateway by an IT group, and many lack the knowledge to install the filtering themselves.
  • Unlike corporate knowledge workers, who have access to team-wide knowledge stores, in a SMB you need to manage, file and retrieve all your information locally and alone. You don’t have anyone managing SharePoint repositories you can use, after all.

So – do you run a small business? Have I missed anything you can add to this list? Leave a comment to share!

Last week I lectured on Information Overload at a seminar for small business entrepreneurs. This is a very diverse, lively and interesting population segment, brimming with energy and originality. I had an interesting time talking to people making a living from areas as different as marriage (and, alas, divorce) counseling, organic food production, web site development, optometry, software coding and interior design. These people were young and old, male and female, technically trained or not; but they had one thing in common: all were victims of massive Information Overload.

Which is strange, in a way: you’d think someone running a small home-based business would be less affected than a corporate cube dweller. And yet there they were, expressing the same struggles and losing battles against overflowing Inboxes as any hi-tech engineer or manager.

And yet, there are subtle differences, so I tried to understand address in my lecture the specific aspects of the problem in a small or home business setting. Below I list what I came up with, and I seek your input to extend or modify this list: