Recently I had occasion to observe a medical expert, a senior professor at a major hospital, as he tried to access a patient’s medical information on the hospital’s computer network. This took a while, and he turned to me and said “As you can see, this computer is no friend of mine”. He then added, apologetically, “Now, if only my grandson were here, he could do this in no time”.
Obviously the doctor was of the pre-computer generation, and many would dismiss his difficulty as a natural result of his age. But as I thought it over, it occurred to me that the man before me is a top notch expert in a field of modern medicine, which is far more complicated than computer operation; his skill and wisdom were well above most people’s. And he was not trying to do any AI programming in machine language; he was in fact looking for data on a system designed to provide that very data. There was absolutely no reason why he should apologize; no, if the computer system did not lend itself to effortless achievement of its purpose by such an intelligent user, it is whoever devised the system who should apologize to him!
The perception – which many older users would agree with – that the computer is not a friend, is a warning sign to computer software designers. The population in the West is aging, and our computers should take that into account; whatever makes a grandfather less at ease than a grandson, the system should be designed to work around it. Quite possibly, in fact, we need a new User Interface paradigm altogether – one that people of all the age groups we have in the world would feel equally at ease with. If the standard Windows-based computer fails to give this feeling to a major population segment, then we need something other that Windows (and its equivalents on other platforms). I hope someone is thinking about it up at Redmond!
I’ve discussed the harmful effects of Online silence, the phenomenon where you send email and no reply arrives for days. Since this phenomenon persists, driven by the endless flood of incoming messages, here are some tactics to apply when you run into it.
- Be proactive. Write your emails to encourage a response – short, to the point, and with clearly marked action items. Make the subject reflect the urgency and the required response: “Can you send me the financial summary by the Tuesday staff meeting?”, not “Staff”. If the mail is fast to read and process, the response is far more likely to be swift.
- Wait. If you get no reply, you need to decide wisely how long to wait before taking further action. Wait too long and your work will suffer; be too hasty and you’ll come across as a nuisance, with equally adverse results. The optimal time to wait depends on the situation – who your recipient is, how busy they are, what your relationship is, and in particular, what action is required at their end. If you asked someone to do some lengthy work for you, you can’t rewrite them the next day: it’s obvious they’ll need a few days to find the time!
- Resend. Once the time has elapsed that you deem appropriate, you can resend your message. Prefix the previous subject with RESEND: , in capitals, to make it stand out; most people may respond more readily if they realize their guilt. Add to the body a polite one-liner, whether “Still awaiting your response…”, or “I really need this by <date>”, or simply “?? : )” and sign “Thanks, <yourname>”. Keep this short and lighthearted, matching the tone to your relationship with the recipient.
- Phone. Either after the resend fails to elicit reaction, or in its place, pick up the phone and call. If you get the guy in person, that’s best; if not, you can leave a message pointing them to your email – note that many people have faster turnaround for voice mail than for email processing. And with the persistent caller ID that is becoming ubiquitous on cellphones, just calling and getting no reply may cause the person to see that you called and call you back.
- Get help. Assuming the recipient is in a remote location, try to find someone there who can grab them in person for you – someone more likely to respond to you because they’re less busy, or your friend, or because it’s their job – like the recipient’s admin or TA.
- Know when to give up. Sometimes it’s just no use… if the recipient is not a close associate, they may simply choose not to interact with you. The important thing is to identify the point of diminishing returns, and stop trying to communicate. After a couple of resends, it just makes little sense to persist.
One thing is relevant to all these steps – always imagine yourself in your recipient’s shoes. It’s rare that they ignore you out of malice; try to imagine their workload, their daily routine, and where you fit into it. Then optimize your communications to be considerate and effective for the them as well as for you. It’s polite – and it’s effective in eliciting a reply!
I was lecturing at Ben Gurion University about Information Overload, and one attendee challenged me with this question: has the cost of disconnecting from the continuous barrage of communications been quantified?
What he meant was this: the accepted wisdom in the Info Overload community is that it is advisable to take time out, “Quiet Time”, pre-assigned time slots in the workday when you don’t pull in incoming messages and calls and try to secure some isolation from interruptions. This allows one to get a stretch of concentrated focused thinking, which can do wonders for creativity, quality and effectiveness. But, as this guy pointed out, it is possible that in doing so you will miss out on important communications, or be perceived as unresponsive and piss off your customers, or slow down the work of your team. Has anyone measured this downside of “Quiet Time”?
The short answer is, not to my knowledge. There have been a number of research reports about the cost of not having focus time (and the numbers can be horrific), but I know of no research into the flip side of this.
A longer answer is, while we don’t have numbers here, I believe that the cost of disconnection can’t be prohibitive because this cost is something we can control by defining intelligently how we take the quiet stretches. To be sure, you can overdo it: I knew one guy (a Fellow at a large corporation) who only read his email twice a week; that would be a bad idea for almost anyone – too little connectivity unless you’re a trappist monk. But if you handle it right, you can retain sufficient interactivity and still have some time to think; taking 2-3 quiet hours at a time will not be too disruptive for most jobs. You need to strike a balance.
To avoid annoying your customers, you can have the best of both worlds – quiet and communication – by building into your methodology a means to reach you based on urgency. I wrote about this in a previous post. But if you’re part of a larger team, as many of us are, it helps if you design the Quiet Time methodology in coordination with your team mates; this has been tried in various places with good results, for instance in the developer team documented in Prof. Perlow’s book “Finding Time“. And if you do it right, you can make the “cost of missed interruptions” as small as you like, while the benefit of being able to think remains fixed. That’s good enough by me…
I was trying to get my email Inbox down to zero for the weekend, and though I was making good progress, I felt a mounting sense of stress. Realizing this, I stopped to introspect: why stress? Here I was, going down the list of incoming messages, deleting the useless ones and addressing the more important stuff, and generally doing a good job. Why stress, rather than a feeling of accomplishment?
So I examined more closely what I was doing in the process, and I realized that many of the emails were carrying “gifts” of additional activities. One message might direct my attention to a possibly interesting video on YouTube; I’d then go and look at it. The next mail might ask me to attend a seminar, providing a link to the agenda; I’d click the link and go check it out. And maybe I’d need to know where the location was, so I’d go into Google Maps to check that too; then, if I decided to attend, I’d go to another link to confirm, and put an item on my calendar. The next message would be that someone wants to connect to me on LinkedIn; off I’d go to check this person’s profile. And so on.
Compare this to the process of reading incoming mail in the old days. There too you had an Inbox – a tray marked IN – and you’d go down its content item by item. But those items would be much more self-contained. None of them would cause you to branch out to a far away place to check more information; if you needed information, it was right there in the envelope. In today’s multitasking world, you keep making short forays into the infinite Web, jumping from mode to mode, from medium to medium, back and forth… I’m no psychologist, but I suspect that this activity format is part of the reason why email processing is more stressing than just slitting envelopes, reading the content and maybe jotting a directive to one’s assistant (or to oneself) about what to do with it.
What do you think?
