Archive for July, 2010

The curse of being in the know

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

The desire to “Be in the Know” has no doubt been around since our stone age ancestors had developed language. In addition to the actual value of the information, it meant being close to the seat of power, to where the decisions of the tribe or village or city-state were being made or influenced. It was a heady feeling and a powerful practical tool in social interactions; it could even be a survival skill.

Unfortunately, this desire to share in the flow of information has taken a nasty turn when Information Overload came around. It used to be that in order to know what’s going on you had to connect – socialize – gossip – with the right people; a few would suffice, and you’d get the benefits of the social interaction to boot. Today, we have email and the ‘net, where the available information is infinite, and most of the information is useless to you. Nevertheless, people retain that urge to know as much as possible, and they keep scanning the stream of messages and updates to the exclusion of real human interaction and useful work.

Consider this manager I was interviewing about his email load a while back. I inquired about a given message in his Inbox, and the guy told me it arrives, regular as clockwork, every week. When I pressed for details I was told that the man never read it, not once. Why not get off the distribution, then, I asked – and the indignant reply was “You want me to lose important information?!” The manager didn’t even perceive the absurdity of the situation: the desire to be in the loop, to receive all the information flowing in the organization, was strong enough to blind him to the fact that he had no time for it anyway.

It takes a good deal of willpower to avoid this trap and let go of a large portion of the information one can access. Being in the know is useful when the know is of significance; otherwise it can just add to the clutter and waste inherent in information overload. How about you - are you trying to bite more of the “know” than you can swallow?

A blast from the past: weekly status updates

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 22, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Periodic status reports are one area where you would do well to look for information overload improvement opportunities. In many organizations the network hums with daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports, often with large amounts of redundancy. Just take a critical look around you, or in the mirror…

But something reminded me the other day of an extreme example of such redundancy, going back to 1982. I had just joined Intel and relocated to Silicon Valley for some on-the-job training, and among the many wonders of the American Way I was introduced to a wonderful method of sharing status information within our team. Being new, I did not view it critically then; I was just amazed…

Here’s how this worked: every Friday a half dozen of us would get into a small conference room for a weekly team meeting. Each of us had written a weekly status report (with pen on paper, personal computers not having yet penetrated the corporate world) and photocopied six copies ahead of the meeting. Once in the room, we would hand around copies to our peers, so we each ended with a sheaf of everyone else’s reports. Then we’d take turns talking about the week’s events – basically lecturing what was written in our reports. This part was certainly useful, and since there were no laptops or blackberries to distract us with email, it led to real brainstorming and sharing. And then… then we’d all go back to our cubicles and throw all the paper into the large trash cans they contained.

Sounds silly? Oh yes, but again: take a look around you. To be sure, most of the traffic is electronic today, which may save trees (though don’t all those electrons come from somewhere too?) But the redundancy, and the senseless distribution of information without regard to actual need to consume it, these are still there. Who knows, maybe in a few decades someone will blog about it with retrospective derision too…

Facebook encroaches on email and blog interaction

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 18, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I observed in my April newsletter that we may be approaching an inflection point: the next generation of workers may not be as eager as their predecessors to “Live in their Email” – they may well choose to live in Facebook, or some equivalent, instead. Some of the younger generation already forgo using email today: they want to talk to their social circle, and doing so in Facebook, where they do indeed live, comes naturally.

Whether this will also happen (at least in part) in the workplace is still unknown, but it’s worth considering – is being considered, I’ve seen, by the more forward-thinking in management circles. If you haven’t thought about it, you should too. Of course this doesn’t necessarily mean corporate employees will use Facebook itself; they may use equivalent intra- or inter-company social networking tools like Lotus Connections.

Until then, Facebook is expanding its scope in other ways, bent as it seems to be on attaining digital world domination. Of relevance to this blog (and no doubt many others): when I started blogging in 2006, comments to my posts would invariably appear on my blog. Today most of them actually show up on Facebook, as comments on my status updates that inform my friends about new posts on either of my blogs. This is an interesting change: it means that the more permanent record – the blog itself – has less interactive discussion, but it also means that my social circle – and those of my commenters – are more closely in the loop. And since I have many more unique blog readers than friends on Facebook, it also indicates that friends are far more likely to engage in commentary on one’s thoughts.

We’ve come a long way since the days when journalists wrote articles in print media, and the rest of us could at most snail mail a letter to the editor about them…

The napping crusade

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 13, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 4 Comments

I had the pleasure of being interviewed for an article on Multitasking by Thea O’Connor, an Australian journalist and health promotion consultant. Of course I visited her web site and I discovered a refreshingly different campaign Thea is crusading for: the Napping Project. The idea being, that “napping is a refreshing and proven solution to tiredness in a time-poor world” – and thus, her intent is to establish the mini-siesta as a socially acceptable and valued practice in our personal and working lives.

At first glance sleeping on the job sounded weird, but then I realized that unless you’re a jet pilot (and possibly if you are too, and you have a copilot) that short nap may be an excellent idea. Not to mention that in today’s brave new world “On the Job” is increasingly fuzzy, thanks to the technology and other trends that did away with our work/life barrier. With Information and Work overload making us all increasingly stressed and tired, and work hours extending into the night, taking a 15 minute nap makes a lot more sense than guzzling another dose of Caffeine and trying to stay awake; and the outcome is sure to make us less stressed and more productive overall. For my part, I do take short rest breaks in the workday if I can; I’m considering going all the way and joining Thea’s project…

Of course, we need to learn how to nap – Thea says you should not sleep more than 20 minutes if you want to wake in an alert state, and many people may not be able to fall asleep in such a short time. My late grandfather, I recall, was definitely able to do it: a busy businessman, he had the capacity to sit in an armchair and fall asleep instantly for a few minutes before going into his next meeting or task; a skill I much envy. He also had an ironclad Work/Life barrier – I may tell you another time.

So what do you think? Would you promote a nap-safe culture in your workplace?

Brevity is the soul of Wit… so where is the soul of Email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 8, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Individual Solutions
. 1 Comment

If Brevity is the soul of Wit (as Shakespeake has Polonius tell us), how much of this soul can we expect in the age of electronic communication?

Not much, probably. Brevity requires more investment than verbosity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Since in today’s overloaded work culture nobody has any time for anything, the tendency is to make emails longer than necessary, to the detriment of the hapless recipient.

There are three places where you see a combination of brevity and wit today. One is automobile vanity license plates: with only 7 characters to use, people get very ingenious. Another is SMS text messages, where the extreme constraints of a cellphone’s human interface, coupled with youngsters’ love of slang, lead to some gems. The third is Twitter, whose 140 character limit actually derives from SMS. Regular email, by contrast, remains high on length and low on literary wit.

The one exception, of course, is email written on handheld mobile devices: BlackBerries and other Smartphones. Typing on these devices’ tiny keyboards is hard enough to discourage long messages. The plain text messages that end in the brief sig “Written on my mobile device” are short indeed; whether they are witty – in today’s sense of “clever and humorous” or in Shakespeare’s of simply intelligent and to the point – varies a good deal, depending on the sender. At any rate, this is one redeeming feature of the BlackBerry where Information Overload is concerned: it may have wrecked our Work/Life barrier, but at least it encourages short messages that can be processed more rapidly.

I conclude with a strong recommendation: Whichever device you use for your mailing, do invest a moment in making your mail messages brief. It isn’t just a matter of Wit, or Soul: it’s that the likelihood of getting a rapid reply (or getting a reply at all) is inversely proportional to message length. Messages longer than a paragraph are that much more likely to be delegated for later reading – and that later moment may never come, with new mail coming in all the time. You have one chance at the recipient’s attention: don’t lose it by being too lazy to be brief. Throwing in some Wit, of course, is optional.

The decay to the rest state

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 4, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 2 Comments

Happy independence day to our American friends!…

Today I want to draw your attention to a phenomenon that is quite familiar to us physicists, but has a place in driving solutions to information overload as well. I refer to the decay to a rest state.

In physics, this is often seen when a system is pushed up to a high energy state: it will lose energy and “decay” to its state of equilibrium. Thus, a mug of hot coffee – a critical item in a knowledge worker’s routine – will lose heat and eventually reach room temperature if you don’t drink it promptly. You need to pump in energy continuously, perhaps by keeping it on a Mug Warmer, to keep it hot.

So how does this apply to Information Overload? Actually it applies to most efforts to change organizational behavior by one initial push. Say you deploy a training program to educate your group to improve their email behavior. Experience shows that what will happen is this: at first, people will be energized by all the new ideas and motivated to apply them. Email effectiveness will go up, work will be more efficient, and people may even get to go home early and see their children awake. But then, as the months pass by, the behaviors will start to decline, and after a year or two everything may go back to where it started – high load, low effectiveness, and devastated Work/Life balance. The equilibrium state…

You see it happen in many programs. Prof. Leslie Perlow reports seeing this decay, within 6 months, at the end of her famous “Quiet Time” pilot, described in her book “Finding Time”. I’ve also seen it happen with a number of training programs we’ve launched at Intel over my career. This decay is a strange phenomenon because there is nothing to be gained by it; everyone is worse off in the “rest state”. So why do smart workers allow it to happen?

Prof. Perlow ascribes this to the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive change in all the related cultural aspects: if the underlying causes of a destructive behavior pattern remain, they will drive people back to where they were. In addition, there is the simple fact that many modern organizations are in a state of constant churn, with reorganizations, mergers, and personnel movement causing new people to come and others to leave a group, diluting the learned lessons. And if a senior manager who was supportive of a change is replaced with one who is not, subordinates will instantly respond to the new manager’s priorities.

So what can we do? For starters, it is important to try and integrate the desired practices as deeply and widely as possible into the organizational culture, affording them protection from the buffeting currents of short-term change. And as long as management remains supportive, you can simply do what the mug warmer does – pump in new energy, that is, maintain the desired state by providing ongoing leadership, role modeling, and periodic refresher training. This last is not expensive, and should be considered as a requirement when you plan a deployment of a training-based program in Info Overload space.