Archive for September, 2010

Information Overload before Email

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 23, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

Real time communication over large distances has been around for millennia, if you count smoke signals and bonfire beacons; but it’s really taken off in the 19th century after the arrival of Morse’s Electric Telegraph in 1844. Suddenly it was possible to freely send text across the nation, and the new invention spread as fast as new wires could be strung up. Isn’t progress great?

The transformation this brought to all aspects of life was sweeping, and is described in Tom Standage’s fascinating book “The Victorian Internet“. My favorite part of this book is the quote from a speech made in 1868 by New York businessman E. W. Dodge. As he put it, “there are doubts whether the telegraph has been so good a friend to the merchant as many have supposed”.

Before Morse, businessmen would ship goods a few times a year, then sit back for a few months to await news of their safe arrival (or not; just check out Antonio in The Merchant of Venice). Contrast this with Dodge’s evocative vignette:

“The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California.”

Sounds familiar, oh you BlackBerry owners?

The result, Dodge continues, is that the modern businessman is

“kept in continual excitement, without time for quiet and rest… [he] must be continually on the jump”.

Maybe this won’t be entirely foreign to your own lifestyle, either? Though of course we should be so lucky as to have to handle only a handful of telegrams a day; telegraphy cost money, so the traffic was minimal next to today’s digital deluge.

But most sadly, Mr. Dodge points out that

“The poor merchant has no other way in which to work to secure a living for his family. He must use the telegraph”.

And there, at least, we today have a glimmer of hope. Sure, we all have to work to feed our families, and we certainly must use email; but we can adopt strategies, tools and best practices that will allow us to have a family dinner in peace, and to balance our life without sacrificing success at work. It isn’t easy, but if you make up your mind, it is doable. Helping people do it has been a large chunk of my work these past 15 years…

The occupational hazards of handling information

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 17, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

Handling stuff has always carried occupational health risks. Back in previous centuries it was physical stuff: if you worked in a coal mine your lungs would get shot; if you lifted product (“16 tons”), your back was at risk; if you dipped matches you’d be poisoned outright… and even dealing with books and ledgers involved the stereotypical “scholarly stoop” or myopic eyes.

In this new century the stuff that matters is information, which is odorless, weightless, and non-toxic; you’d think there would be no hazards associated with its handling. And yet, there are distinct health issues related to Information Work.

The best known culprits are repetitive stress injury (RSI) from typing, and lower back pain from sitting immobile before a screen. These are quite common and can be seriously harmful; some people lose the use of their hands completely for long periods of time, and it can happen without warning. Preventive solutions are simple – ergonomic chairs and workstation setup, wrist support at the keyboard, and of course taking frequent breaks to stretch and rest one’s muscles. Unfortunately many people don’t do this until it is too late; if I were a boy scout I could get my “good deed” credits just from all the times I  tell people to sit correctly. It’s incredible how contorted and unhealthy people’s positions can be – some sink down in their low chairs while looking up at the screen, a pose that reminds me of the position of the “Mayan astronaut” from Palenque…

Then there are the people who insist on using LCD screens at non-optimal resolutions, making the image fuzzy to the detriment of their eyes; and there are those who tote heavy laptops without resorting to a backpack.

But most intriguing, though far from fully understood yet, is the damage to our brains from processing too much information. We’ve known for a while that information overload affects mental acuity in a variety of ways – temporarily; but whether it caused permanent physical changes to the brain’s hardware was unclear. Recent research seems to suggest that such changes actually might occur, as the brain “rewires” itself in response to the hectic information processing mode of today. This is the stuff of Nicholas Carr’s famous article  “Is Google making us stupid?” and his book “The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains” which I plan to grab in my next Amazon order…

So, next time you have a few tons to lift, use your knees (or a fork lift); and next time you log onto your computer, be just as careful!

Is the brevity of SMS language compromising our emails?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 12, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

An interesting observation in a client meeting: we were discussing the contribution of language gaps in a global company to email overload, and one participant pointed out that these days many younger employees use the super-abbreviated “SMS language” in their emails, leading to more misunderstood messages than in the past.

Writing brief emails is not a new device; I notice it particularly among senior executives, who respond in one-liners and even in ALL CAPS to maintain communication despite the overload. These, however, tend to be older people and they write these brief emails in English. For instance, a baby boomer might write “PLEASE CALL ME, I NEED YOUR REPORT BEFORE 4PM”. A Gen Y employee, meanwhile, might put this as “pcm I nd ur rpt b4 4pm“…

The infiltration of SMS style into other media is already seen as a problem in the education system; pessimists are predicting an ominous future for language skills, a debate I won’t go into here. But in corporate email, a medium already prone to misunderstanding, changing the Lingua Franca from English to “txtese” may aggravate the problem – especially where we have different generations trying to collaborate.

Note that the effect is not only on misunderstandings; in most cases a recipient may identify that risk, and this results in a cascade of follow-on emails to try and clarify what the sender had meant. More emails, more pressure, less time, more incentive to abbreviate… do you see a vicious circle here?

I’m interested to hear to what extent you see this problem at your own workplace… please share in the comments!

The collaboration-killing desk

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 7, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

Collaboration is a crucial aspect of work in most hi-tech companies. Office cubicles, for better or worse, are also present in many of them. You’d think, therefore, that the latter would be designed to facilitate the former…

No such luck, however. Consider the most common type of desk seen in the cube farms.

Standard Cubicle Desk

Image courtesy GraceFamily, shared on flickr under CC license.

The basic concept seems to make sense: the L-shaped desk, bridged at the angle by a diagonal area for the keyboard, allows one to sit facing the screen while having everything else – phone, file trays, drawers, and the perennial coffee mug – within easy reach. It’s the knowledge worker’s dream setup, it seems.  The misanthropic knowledge worker, that is…

Think about it: the L desk pretty much guarantees that two people will never be able to comfortably collaborate in this cube. If one of them is at the keyboard, the second must squeeze in behind this user’s back. This explains why people so often go to a cafeteria or conference room to talk: their own office is meant for solo work only.

Kudos to my friend Michael, then. An engineer at a hi-tech plant, Michael kicked out the standard corner desk and managed to commandeer a rectangular straight table instead. Less fancy, but now he could host a coworker in a side-by-side sitting configuration, all in the same size of cubicle!

Five tactics to prevent your email from reaching the wrong eyes

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 3, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

In a previous post we saw that it’s all too easy for your email to find its way to people you hadn’t meant it for. So, what can you do when sending a sensitive message, to prevent such embarrassment (or worse)?

Here are some tactics to consider:

  • You can put in the message an explicit plea for discretion, such as “For your eyes only” or “DO NOT FORWARD”. You can also put “[Private]” in the subject, though that may draw the attention of hackers and people passing by an unlocked PC in the recipient’s absence. But of course, this is only a first line of defense…
  • Before hitting SEND, read through the To and CC fields carefully – make sure you’re sending to whoever you think you are. This is especially true if you’re mailing to a mixed group having people both internal and external to your company.
  • Be proactive: formulate sensitive messages as if you know they’ll leak. For instance, remove the “tail” of earlier exchanges, and then allude to it indirectly: don’t say “I agree with you that it was probably George who stole Jennifer’s wallet from her office, he always seemed dishonest to me”; say instead only “I think you’re right about what happened, and I’m not surprised, knowing the person involved”. Your correspondent will know what you mean, but if she accidentally shares your message no one else will.
  • Encrypt any really sensitive information in a file and attach it to your email. And don’t rely on Pig Latin; there are powerful encryption tools available out there!
  • And despite all that – you should always assume that sooner or later your mail will be shared with people you hadn’t intended to see it. If you can’t accept this risk at all, don’t send the message via email – period!

Lastly: you are a recipient yourself. Protect your friends and coworkers by not disclosing their messages to others, unless you’re sure they’d approve. Do unto others…