A manager at a small company told me over coffee of a job interview she gave a young candidate, in the middle of which he received a cellphone call from his wife (who wanted, with the wrong timing, to wish him luck in the coming interview).
I was curious how this had affected her attitude to the candidate. After all, on one hand, it is nice that he’d answer his wife – he proved to be a considerate spouse. Yet on the other hand he had interrupted the interview and did not have the courtesy to either shut the phone down (or silence it) before the interview, or to ignore it once it rang. He was showing respect to his wife, and disrespect to his potential employer.
The manager told me she did not let the incident count against the young fellow, but she did think he was being immature. I think that for my part, I’d be less forgiving in this case – I’d interrupt a friendly conversation myself for a phone call I care about, but not a formal meeting like an interview. After all, there are two people involved – the one phoning you and the one talking to you; why give the interrupter priority over the one in your presence? Isn’t it rude? It’s the same attitude you meet at the bank, when the clerk serving you keeps devoting time to phone calls from other clients – ignoring the fact that you had patiently waited in line: why are the callers more important, you can’t help thinking?
And I think a key problem here is that we don’t really have good etiquette norms in place. Other areas of social interaction have evolved more slowly, and there are accepted Do’s and Don’ts covering them. Not so cellular telephony, where anything goes.
Maybe it’s time to take stock and create the missing rules of etiquette?
What do you think?
My lectures on Information Overload invariably elicit an applause, which is gratifying but leaves open the question: what is the real impact on attendees in the long term? With long-term organizational interventions, we can collect data; but a lecture is a one-time encounter!
I was therefore pleased when I gave a lecture at a venue I revisit every few weeks, and a technician who was there to support the IT stuff came to me and said he’s heard me the previous month and had taken my advice to heart. He’d taken stock of his communication habits, gotten off lists, created rules, and so on – none of it rocket science, but the effect was (he said) a major time saving each day.
I must be doing something right, then! 
I was discussing email overload with two VPs in a hi-tech company, and one of them shared the observation that he had been suffering from heavy email loads until an auspicious event happened: he had appointed a more junior person to manage part of his activity, and the overload disappeared.
Of course one hopes he had good cause to appoint the subordinate to the role, other than to ease his own Inbox nightmare; but even so, it is interesting to consider what has been talking place here. There can be a number of mechanisms at play:
- The VP had been receiving massive amounts of unimportant mail from below, which were now being deleted by the subordinate (and harming the latter’s productivity).
- The VP had been receiving massive amounts of important mail from below, which were now intercepted and handled in more timely fashion by his subordinate in the latter’s line of duty.
- The VP had been receiving massive amounts of mail from other organizations (not his own group) that were now sent directly instead to his subordinate for handling.
We could go on, but the main thing is that these scenarios differ significantly in what they tell us of the organization’s work processes. In scenario 1, the useless mail kept coming, and an expensive management resource was being used as a “human shield” to protect the VP. In scenario 2, the addition of the lower manager was causing a re-division of work in a sensible way, freeing the VP – presumably – to do other tasks. Scenario 3 tells us that the appointment was accompanied by a redefinition of workflows in the larger organization.
And then there is a possible fourth scenario, which thankfully did not happen in this case: the load on the VP could have stayed the same, while his helper would have had a similar load. This can happen if the organization is so smitten with over-communication that everyone would copy both managers, quite unnecessarily. It is an electronic version of Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. More employees – more available time to do email!
An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today:
One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed:
I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time.
A lovely domestic tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload.
By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once a week to my Grandma’s home (she had the only TV set in the familt back then) to watch “The Forsyte Saga” on the single B&W channel available then. Television watching – for all its shortcomings – was at least about family togetherness in the days before email!
