My recent trip to the US was a pleasure, except for one shock: I went to the nearest Borders bookstore, and discovered the bookseller chain had closed forever the preceding week.
I do favor small independent bookstores, and have been worried about their tendency to disappear under pressure of the larger chains; still, I had to admit that Borders had a pleasant aspect that provided a bookworm with a delightful experience. Seeing it go under – one can surmise, due to the pressure of Internet-based alternatives and other shifts in information consumption habits of the 21st century – was profoundly saddening to me.
So, to pay my respects to this venerable bookseller, I dug up an old bookmark I have (I collect bookmarks of stores I like) from their Ann Arbor location – the town where Borders originated 40 years ago – and here it is. Somehow the serene reading lady in this vignette represents the pleasure that Borders had given us all.
It will be remembered fondly.
One of the slides in my Information Overload lecture analyzes the root causes of sending useless email, and goes into the very human motivators stemming from mistrust in many corporate cultures. One of these is CYA – sending mail, or copying too many people on it, to cover one’s backside.
So in a recent lecture one of my audience, not being a native English speaker, raised her hand and asked what CYA meant. I translated it for her and explained how people might send mail to people who had no need for it merely to cover themselves from any objection. She immediately got it, but another attendee said he thought I had meant the CYA was for use in the subject line of the message, to indicate its true nature – like the other cues I advocate using: HOT, FYI, etc.
Obviously this is not going to happen; no one will specify that they’re sending a message for this reason. But one may dream… surely we could all benefit if it were customary and required for people who send useless mail to prefix the subject with cues like CYA, or USELESS, or BS, or DELETEME… indeed, as computers get ever more powerful, we could delegate adding the cues to the email server, based on semantic analysis of the message’s content. We already have tools analyzing messages for importance (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, or ClearContext for Outlook); why can’t they analyze them for inconsiderate, useless content?
Oh well…
A lecture attendee reacted to my data about the scary extent of disruption caused by endlessly ringing cellphones by saying: “I keep my cellphone turned on only in case my child calls – I wish it would only ring for him!”
Now, here is a feature that is painfully needed, and obviously useful: Allow the user to specify which callers the phone will ring for, and which it will not, when you put it into a “Silent” mode. Or use “vibrate” as part of the equation: Ring for calls from an emergency-prone dependent, vibrate for close family and coworkers, let all others leave a message.
How about it, developers?
I was discussing Email Overload with a friend of mine who is a veteran manager at an international hi-tech company, and he made an interesting observation. His company, he said, is large enough that many email senders have no idea who should be copied on their messages; they can’t be sure who “needs to know”, so they just CC everyone who is remotely likely to be involved. Basically, they are replacing “Need to Know” with “Might possibly need to know”.
Of course, although these folks think “better safe than sorry”, they should be very sorry – the recipients that don’t need the information are wasting time, effort and peace of mind on the useless mail they receive. They are, in effect, paying with overload for the senders’ ignorance of their actual work needs.
So what can one do? You can’t make the company smaller; but you might ensure people have access to a better mapping of coworkers’ needs and interests. With today’s Social Media platforms, this mapping is much more accessible than before. Another reason to adopt social media in the enterprise!
I was having coffee with a colleague I go back a long way with, and he told me of his first encounter with email. He had just joined Intel (in Israel) in 1988, and his boss showed him his new cubicle, his desk, and his computer, on which he demonstrated the email application. My friend came from a workplace where there was no such thing, and the following conversation ensued, more or less:
My friend: What is this for?
His boss: well, if you want to write something to someone, you write it in this window, add the person’s name on this line, and hit Send!
Friend: Oh, will I be supposed to communicate with people in the USA in performing my job?
Boss: Well, not necessarily. You can use it to communicate with people right here in our plant.
Friend: But they’re all here in this same office space, why on earth would I be sending them this email when I can talk to them?
Today, when coworkers send each other email from one cubicle to the next, this exchange would be unthinkable, yet my friend’s instinctive response is so sensible. It made me think: now it takes a serious effort to deploy a “No Email Day” program to get people to talk to each other again, but maybe back then the email addiction could have been stopped?
Ah, the innocence of youth…
