Archive for the 'Individual Solutions' Category

The napping crusade

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 13, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 4 Comments

I had the pleasure of being interviewed for an article on Multitasking by Thea O’Connor, an Australian journalist and health promotion consultant. Of course I visited her web site and I discovered a refreshingly different campaign Thea is crusading for: the Napping Project. The idea being, that “napping is a refreshing and proven solution to tiredness in a time-poor world” – and thus, her intent is to establish the mini-siesta as a socially acceptable and valued practice in our personal and working lives.

At first glance sleeping on the job sounded weird, but then I realized that unless you’re a jet pilot (and possibly if you are too, and you have a copilot) that short nap may be an excellent idea. Not to mention that in today’s brave new world “On the Job” is increasingly fuzzy, thanks to the technology and other trends that did away with our work/life barrier. With Information and Work overload making us all increasingly stressed and tired, and work hours extending into the night, taking a 15 minute nap makes a lot more sense than guzzling another dose of Caffeine and trying to stay awake; and the outcome is sure to make us less stressed and more productive overall. For my part, I do take short rest breaks in the workday if I can; I’m considering going all the way and joining Thea’s project…

Of course, we need to learn how to nap – Thea says you should not sleep more than 20 minutes if you want to wake in an alert state, and many people may not be able to fall asleep in such a short time. My late grandfather, I recall, was definitely able to do it: a busy businessman, he had the capacity to sit in an armchair and fall asleep instantly for a few minutes before going into his next meeting or task; a skill I much envy. He also had an ironclad Work/Life barrier – I may tell you another time.

So what do you think? Would you promote a nap-safe culture in your workplace?

Brevity is the soul of Wit… so where is the soul of Email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 8, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Individual Solutions
. 1 Comment

If Brevity is the soul of Wit (as Shakespeake has Polonius tell us), how much of this soul can we expect in the age of electronic communication?

Not much, probably. Brevity requires more investment than verbosity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Since in today’s overloaded work culture nobody has any time for anything, the tendency is to make emails longer than necessary, to the detriment of the hapless recipient.

There are three places where you see a combination of brevity and wit today. One is automobile vanity license plates: with only 7 characters to use, people get very ingenious. Another is SMS text messages, where the extreme constraints of a cellphone’s human interface, coupled with youngsters’ love of slang, lead to some gems. The third is Twitter, whose 140 character limit actually derives from SMS. Regular email, by contrast, remains high on length and low on literary wit.

The one exception, of course, is email written on handheld mobile devices: BlackBerries and other Smartphones. Typing on these devices’ tiny keyboards is hard enough to discourage long messages. The plain text messages that end in the brief sig “Written on my mobile device” are short indeed; whether they are witty – in today’s sense of “clever and humorous” or in Shakespeare’s of simply intelligent and to the point – varies a good deal, depending on the sender. At any rate, this is one redeeming feature of the BlackBerry where Information Overload is concerned: it may have wrecked our Work/Life barrier, but at least it encourages short messages that can be processed more rapidly.

I conclude with a strong recommendation: Whichever device you use for your mailing, do invest a moment in making your mail messages brief. It isn’t just a matter of Wit, or Soul: it’s that the likelihood of getting a rapid reply (or getting a reply at all) is inversely proportional to message length. Messages longer than a paragraph are that much more likely to be delegated for later reading – and that later moment may never come, with new mail coming in all the time. You have one chance at the recipient’s attention: don’t lose it by being too lazy to be brief. Throwing in some Wit, of course, is optional.

How to avoid email mania without annoying your customers

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 18, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

Here is a question I was asked by an attendee at one of my lectures. I was teaching the importance of not using email like Instant Messenger, of reading it only a few times a day in preset slots. The guy wanted to know how can he do this, when his customers expect him to respond instantly? Won’t they be annoyed (to use a mild term)? He would prefer to suffer than to upset his customers!

He certainly had a point. In my experience if you cut your email reading just like that, cold turkey, some of your correspondents will in fact go ballistic: What? You received my email ten minutes ago and haven’t already replied!?!? Interestingly, this has nothing to do with urgency; you’ll get this response whether you’re a brain surgeon on call or a student on vacation. So what can you do?

The answer is, you don’t “Just do it”; you plan it and communicate it and make provision for the obsessive expectations of Blackberry-toting colleagues. At a minimum, if you expect an adverse reaction, you can put in your sig a blurb like: “In the interest of staying sane and productive, I only read email twice a day; I try to reply within one business day”.

That approach may placate some of your customers – after all, they have a direct interest in your staying productive for their benefit! But there will always be the slightly hyperactive types who react with “OMG, what if I need this guy urgently? What if my life/business/happiness depended on his seeing my message right away?!” For these, you need to do one more thing: provide a method to reach you immediately in urgent cases. This should be a bit more laborious than clicking “Send”, to prevent its abuse; but the customer will feel much better if they know that should they need you immediately, they won’t be frustrated.

The simplest method of doing this is to provide a cellular phone number to these people, either on a one by one basis or simply by including it in your sig. You may also need to clarify to them that they should feel free to use the phone (you’ll be surprised, but not all people feel OK with that). A more sophisticated method is provided by the elegant solution called AwayFind, which you can see here. You sign on to use it, and then you add to your sig something like “I check email twice daily; to reach me sooner, click here: https://awayfind.com/johnsmith”. Clicking the link takes your correspondent to a web form where they fill a brief message; you will be notified of this to your cellphone immediately. Away Find does a lot more than that – it allows you to configure it to alert you of incoming email that you do need to know of immediately, based on various criteria, so you too can have peace of mind while staying away from the 24×7 mail checking addiction.

So, to sum it up: read your mail in batch mode in preset slots, and give your customers, bless them, a workaround for really urgent stuff. That way you are happy and effective, and they can still get to you as needed. If they can’t accept that, maybe you picked the wrong customers?

Reading email or Understanding email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 12, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms and Individual Solutions
. 4 Comments

Considering the amount of time we all spend reading incoming email, it’s amazing how little we understand what we read.

That reading and understanding are two different things is clear; this is why legal documents use verbiage like “I confirm that I have read and understood the terms & conditions bla bla bla”… but it’s amazing how easy it is to read a mail message and totally miss large chunks of it. People glance at the message, form an impression of what it means to them, and move on – after all, they may have 100 others waiting to be read. The outcome is a degradation of communications that leads to many more messages as people try to fix the mess.

A common manifestation of this is the fact that nobody seems to respond to more than one action request per message. If the sender asks them three questions, a response to the first one is far more likely than having them all reacted to. The sender then sends an additional message to demand the remaining requests be filled, adding to the Infoglut.

There are practical implications: if you want someone to react to a number of queries or tasks, either send them in separate messages (preferable, unless they’re all related to the same matter), or put them in a clearly numbered list format, with the subject of the message stating “Three questions for you” or the like.

Another outcome of reading blindly is that people may jump to the wrong conclusion about the sender’s intent or attitude; many a gaffe has resulted from such mis-reading. It helps if you’re in the habit of delaying angry responses… what seemed as an insult at first glance may turn out to be quite appropriate once the context is clear.

And of course, you increase your chance of having your messages understood and acted on if you keep them short, clear and to the point. But that – writing a well-phrased letter – is one of those lost liberal arts…

Do not Disturb!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 30, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

My Nokia E71 smartphone has a selection of available specialized profiles, of which the most useful one is probably “Silent”, for use in meetings and theatres. Useful, yet I use it with trepidation.

I fear the Silent profile because I KNOW, I’m practically certain, that I will forget to turn it off when the meeting is over, only to discover later an accumulation of “missed calls”.

The obvious solution, which seems to elude the good designers at Nokia (and at the makers of every other Smartphone I’ve used to date), is to implement a profile of “silent for one hour”, or maybe “silent for N minutes” with user entry of the duration. This mode would automatically revert to the normal noisy profile after the specified delay.

The same concept applies to software tools that help you stay productive in the face of the endless inflow of information. The notion of a “Do Not Disturb” button that turns off alerts of incoming messages has been around for some years;  and we’re beginning to see tools that apply it. ClearContext, an Outlook add-on that helps one sort through the mail and integrate it into one’s overall time/task management environment, features this button to control email notifications. As the impact of the growing infoglut grows, I expect we’ll see more in this space.

And another thought: in ages past, someone wanting peace and quiet would retire to a convent for a year or a lifetime; in our present hectic era, a tool giving us an hour sans ringtones is the best we can hope for…

My Nokia E71 smartphone has a selection of available specialized profiles, of which the most useful one is probably “Silent”, for use in meetings and theatres. Useful, yet I use it with trepidation.

I fear the Silent profile because I KNOW, I’m practically certain, that I will forget to turn it off when the meeting is over, only to discover later an accumulation of “missed calls”.

The obvious solution, which seems to elude the good designers at Nokia (and at the makers of every other Smartphone I’ve used to date), is to implement a profile of “silent for one hour”, or maybe “silent for N minutes” with user entry of the duration. This mode would automatically revert to the normal noisy profile after the specified delay.

The same concept applies to software tools that help you stay productive in the face of the endless inflow of information. The notion of a “Do Not Disturb” button that turns off alerts of incoming messages has been around for some years; and we’re beginning to see tools that apply it. ClearContext, an Outlook add-on that helps one sort through the mail and integrate it into one’s overall time/task management environment, features this button to control email notifications. As the impact of the growing infoglut grows, I expect we’ll have more in this space.

And another thought: in ages past someone wanting peace and quiet would retire to a convent for a year or a lifetime; in our present hectic era, a tool giving us an hour sans ringtones is the best we can hope for…

Nathan’s First Tip for fighting email overload

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 17, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

To completely stop email overload, you need to tailor a complete organizational solution; you can get some ideas for that on my site. But I find that many people derive value by implementing some simple individual measures, and I often get asked what the best of these are.

So here, for your enjoyment, is my favorite first tip, the one you should take if you were to take one tip  only to the proverbial desert island (assuming they had WiFi on the island):

Only check your email in preset time slots each day.

This seemingly obvious idea is actually powerful medicine. It directly attacks the Inbox addiction that makes countless people check for new messages every few minutes around the clock; which removes a major source of interruptions from the hectic lifestyle of this “age of the Blackberry”. This empowers you to focus your mind and work on creative action. It also saves a significant amount of time, since doing work in short chopped chunks adds up to 40% to the total time they take.

There are two technical details to this. First, there’s the question of when in the day to do the email processing? That is really up to you. A good idea is to steer clear of the times when your biological rhythms render you more creative. Then there are considerations of work rhythms: if you interact with a distant time zone, you may need a mail check first thing in the morning. But the main thing is to have a few (1 – 4) fixed, preset slots and to have the self-discipline to stick with them.

Second, you must stop the incoming messages from coming after you! This means removing all the alerts that announce new email arrival: the audible beeps, the “toast” message boxes (so called because they pop up like bread from a toaster, at least in Outlook), the little envelope in the task bar, and so forth. These can be turned off in your email Options – better go turn them off right now!

Are you already doing this? If so, share your choice of times and your experience in the comments.

To completely stop email overload, you need to tailor a complete organizational solution; you can get some ideas for that on my site. But I find that many people derive value by implementing some simple individual measures, and I often get asked what the best of these are.

So here, for your enjoyment, is my favorite first tip, the one you should take if you were to take one tip only to the proverbial desert island (assuming they had WiFi on the island):

Only check your email in preset time slots each day.

This seemingly obvious idea is actually powerful medicine. It directly attacks the Inbox addiction that makes countless people check for new messages every few minutes around the clock; which removes a major source of interruptions from the hectic lifestyle of this “age of the Blackberry”. This empowers you to focus your mind and work on creative action. It also saves a significant amount of time, since doing work in short chopped chunks adds up to 40% to the total time they take.

There are two technical details to this. First, there’s the question of when in the day to do the email processing? That is really up to you. A good idea is to steer clear of the times when your biological rhythms render you more creative. Then there are considerations of work rhythms: if you interact with a distant time zone, you may need a mail check first thing in the morning. But the main thing is to have a few (1 – 4) fixed, preset slots and to have the self-discipline to stick with them.

Second, you must stop the incoming messages from coming after you! This means removing all the alerts that announce new email arrival: the audible beeps, the “toast” message boxes (so called because they pop up like bread from a toaster, at least in Outlook), the little envelope in the task bar, and so forth. These can be turned off in your email Options – better go turn them off right now!

Are you already doing this? If so, share your choice of times and your experience in the comments.

Five ways to prevent gaffes in email

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 8, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

The horror stories abound. A careless click on Send, and incalculable damage befalls a sensitive business deal or workplace relationship. Or the sender can become a joke. Or worse.

This is not new; even before email, a careless letter could do much damage if it fell into the wrong hands, or was written in haste. I still keep a mimeographed letter sent by the HR manager of a company to all its employees, where his typist dropped a single letter in the phrase “To: all employees”. Unfortunately for him, this was in Hebrew, and the accidentally misspelled phrase read “To: all slaves” (I kid you not!).

But email is worse than paper mail, much more prone to destructive faux pas. There are a number of reasons:

  • Email overload is such that one tends not to put much careful thought into any one message.
  • Email is far easier to send to large distribution lists.
  • Email can be forwarded very easily to unintended parties.
  • The old paper letters had built in delays: they required drafting, typing, proofing, folding, putting in an envelope, stamping, carrying to the mail drop… all allowing the sender to rethink.

So, how can you avoid sending emails you’ll regret? My suggestions:

  1. Think before you type. That is a generally useful idea, of course… and oft overlooked.
  2. Re-read after you type. In addition to allowing you to refine what you’re trying to say, this will catch typos and those hilarious spellchecker glitches.
  3. Never answer an email when you’re angry or agitated about it. Sleep on it first!
  4. Make it a habit to double-check your addressee list before clicking Send. This is a good time to remove unneeded recipients (reducing their email overload); and it also allows you to detect any wrong addresses, such as ones resulting from mis-typed auto-completed contacts, or a thoughtless Reply-to-All. Take special care with people from other organizations whose addresses may go unnoticed among your own coworkers.
  5. Lastly, I strongly recommend you set your email program to delay a little before sending out mail, so you can change your mind after hitting Send. In Outlook, you can do this by setting a rule to delay all sent messages (see here). However, this is hard to override if you have an urgent message to push out. To solve this, you can schedule periodic Send/Receive operations (see here); in this way you can still manually hit Send/Receive when you want instant sending (the disadvantage of this method is that a small fraction of messages – those sent just before the scheduled synchronization – will not be delayed).

Murphy is still lurking out there, but by following these tips you may be able to keep his laws at bay.

If you have any more ideas (or horror stories) please share them in the comments!

The early bird gets nowhere

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 23, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms and Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.

The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…

You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.

People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.

The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…

You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.

Stop hoarding information for a rainy day

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 29, 2009
in Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

Here’s a story from the early nineties, a time when much information in the workplace was stored and moved on sheets of mashed tree pulp.

Back then I was doing research into Artificial Neural Networks, and my coworkers at Intel got into the habit of mailing me (in an inter-office envelope) a copy of any article on the subject that they came across. And I got into the habit of piling the articles at the corner of my desk, so that I might read them one day when I had the time. After all, they were articles in my field of interest, so it made sense that I should read them and become wiser.

Unfortunately, the day when I’d have time never came, and the pile of papers kept growing higher, and my morale went lower in proportion… Still, what could I do but keep the papers? They were in my field of interest, right?! I couldn’t risk missing out on any of them!

Then one day I had an epiphany. I dumped the whole pile in the trashcan and resolved that when that auspicious day  finally came, I would buy the best book on ANN out there and read it instead. After all, the papers were pushed at me without much selection, so the best book was guaranteed to be better. The pile was gone, my morale went up again, and guess what… the day has yet to arrive.

I’m sharing this story because of its clear analogy to today’s information overload. Many people have overflowing Inboxes because they feel they need to receive and keep mailings that are related to their field, even if they lack the time to read them in real time so they just accumulate. They’re afraid to miss out on the wisdom. Yet in reality life is too short to read it all, and one is far better off deleting many FYI messages, however enlightening; if you’re left with bandwidth to spare (yeah, right) you can always put it to better use when it’s you deciding how to apply it. Give it a try and see!

Screening after-hours interruptions

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 17, 2009
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

Today’s knowledge workers are normally assumed to be working on company business well after they went home for the night; they are always reachable by cellphone and email. Of course they could turn off their devices when they exit the office, but most are afraid to do so in case of a real emergency, which in our global economy can come at any hour and demand their attention. What can they do?

I was heartened to hear an original solution from a woman who juggles the tasks of managing a group in a high tech company, raising two kids, and having a life. She told me that she simply leaves her computer in the office when she leaves; her coworkers know that she never works at home. However, because her role does involve responding to urgent situations, she makes it known that she’s always available on her cell. But – and here is the twist – if anyone calls her with an urgent action item after hours, she tells them she has no computer with her, so she’ll be happy to drive to the office – which is not far from her home – and deal with matters there. Guess what: 90% of callers beg her to stay at home; the urgency suddenly evaporates and it turns out that the task can wait until morning.

What this smart lady did is put in a filter: she’s really willing to make the trip, but when confronted with this higher threshold of inconveniencing her the callers are forced to make a serious judgment call on whether their need justifies the intrusion. True emergencies make it through this filter; the rest are withdrawn.

Many lessons in this story!