The intent of email is to facilitate communication. Right?
So – someone mails me to ask to meet Tuesday. I send a reply:
I can’t meet Face to Face that day, so let’s do it by phone – can you do it at 3 PM?
The reply I get says:
If it’s FTF I can’t, can we do it on the phone?
This happens all the time: you explicitly write something – and your correspondent acts as if it weren’t there. Can’t they read?!
Truth is, they can read all right, but they have so many emails, so little time, and so many distractions that they only scan the message ever so quickly and react to the first thing that registers. Which results in incomplete communication, which requires more mails to resolve the mess, which increases the load… a classic runaway positive feedback loop!
Every year in October Basex, a New York based analyst company that is very active in the war on Info Overload, announces the observance of the worldwide Information Overload Awareness Day. This holiday, which is sponsored by our Information Overload Research Group, may not cure the problem that is exacting a growing toll on the effectiveness and sanity of knowledge workers worldwide, but it is a way to give some reach to the message that something needs to be done about it!
This year the day is Thursday, Oct. 20, and I urge you to devote some time during that day to consider how you can reduce the overload you suffer and the one you create for others – and to disseminate this call for action through your own social channels. If we all try to reduce the overload for those around us, we will make the world a better place.
Happy IOAD, folks!
The letter “e” has become a central symbol of the internet age, along with the once obscure “@” glyph. We have it prefixed to all sorts of old words, from Commerce to Bay, from Business to Book… and of course, to Mail, giving us what remains possibly the most useful online tool yet devised: email.
But things change, and the venerable “e” is beginning to slip. I notice that more and more young people drop the “e” and just say “mail” without even realizing the ambiguity this introduces – their generation’s experience with paper-in-envelope mail is so scanty that they are quite unconscious of it.
Wonder which e-word will morph next?
So we’ve made the switch back from Daylight Saving Time yesterday at 2AM, and like every year I got up in the morning and made the round of the house to set all clocks, watches, computers and other devices one hour back. This is always a bore – there are so many time-aware contraptions in a typical home…
But this time I noticed one new thing – about half of these contraptions did not need resetting. The computers changed their time on their own (seems trivial to you folks elsewhere, but in Israel the changeover date follows the Jewish calendar and local politics, so it’s different every year; looks like Windows 7 knows how to pull the information in better than XP had). My smartphone got the correct time from the cellular provider over the airwaves. The PVR in the living room got the time from the cable company. Only watches and standalone clocks like the one in the car needed fixing manually!
This is one advantage of the fact that – let’s face it – computers have pretty much taken over everything in our modern environment. In the past decade or two microprocessors have infiltrated every machine, from your car to your dishwasher; but now they can also talk to each other over their global network and manage their own time zone affairs while we sleep!
Scary? perhaps… but very convenient! 
