I was talking to a manager of IT systems in a financial organization, and she told me of an impressive step she’d taken to improve effectiveness. She had a group of programmers working for her, and they were suffering – as do we all – from frequent interruptions. So she removed the (landline) telephones from their rooms! She also made it known that these people were not to be interrupted by other means, and thereby allowed them to do what they were there for – write code.

The results were very evident: efficiency in this team had visibly improved relative to earlier times. This is not surprising: we know that interruptions can wreak havoc on any knowledge worker’s effectiveness, but we also know that this is especially harmful to coders, because they take 15-30 minutes just to get in “the flow”. Interrupting them with ringing phones even 2-3 times an hour can keep them in “Continuous partial attention” full-time!

So, no surprise in the outcome – but definite surprise that this manager had the rare wisdom (and guts) to enforce this beneficial no-phone regime on her team!

Every now and then someone proclaims that email has outlived its usefulness (some, groaning under their Inboxes, might say outstayed its welcome), and is on the way out. How about it?

It might seem that these pronouncements of doom for the world’s most widely used messaging channel have some basis. After all, the young generation – Generation Y – really prefer to conduct much of their communication via Facebook; it is said that some universities don’t bother to assign email accounts to their students because they don’t need them anymore. And even in the enterprise, we have that startling declaration by Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin, that he will have his company email-free by 2014…

On the other hand, what M. Breton is talking about is replacing internal email with social media and collaboration platforms; he never said anything about external mail. And while students may prefer Facebook (with good reason – it is so much more fun!), they will still use email when they hit the workplace if that’s what their coworkers, bosses and customers use to do business.

In my view the best way to look at this question is to consider facsimile machines. Fax technology has been in use, almost unchanged, for half a century. It is truly antiquated: faxes are limited to Black and White, have very poor resolution, are riddled by a variety of machine malfunctions, and are excruciatingly slow. You’d think they would be seen by now only in technology museums, alongside typewriters and adding machines. And yet fax machines continue to be sold, and the capability is integrated in multifunction printers that include scanners superior to it in every way. Faxing is nowhere near going away, because it combines the power of habit – that is, a huge installed base – with extreme simplicity: sticking a sheet of paper in a slot and dialing a phone number is something even your grandmother can do; scanning and attaching to email (and extracting the image at the other end) is way more complex and error-prone. People prefer faxing, and faxes may remain here long after the desk telephones that had coexisted with them will be forgotten.

Email may behave the same way – it is old and problematic, but it is also universal, familiar, and easy to use. And as long as your granny uses it, no matter how progressive you are and how cool your Facebook page is, you will stay with it as well – after all, if you won’t react to her emails, she’ll go right to her desk phone to demand an explanation!…

I was talking to a young manager in a hi-tech company and she shared an interesting insight. She had recently been equipped by her company with a Smartphone, and it had decreased her stress level at home significantly, she happily stated. Why so? Because, she explained, she was no longer afraid to miss out on anything – she could check her email during the evening as often as she wanted in order to see if anything urgent had come up.

This is very interesting: before the arrival of the always-connected device, she couldn’t be connected – nor be on call – after hours. This should have been ideal: she could devote time to her family, she could relax, she could recharge for the next productive day. Best of all, nobody could blame her – there was no connectivity to the workplace, after all. But instead of relishing this highly desirable state (which is increasingly denied to knowledge workers these days) she felt so compelled to “stay connected” that she was anxious, lest something happen and it would have to wait for the next morning’s dose of email-checking. What is in fact an intrusion on her personal sphere had seemed to her a stress-reducing gift from heaven.

You might think that this diligent worker was a brain surgeon on call, or a firefighter; actually her job had no urgency in it. There was nothing in her tasks that could not comfortably wait a day or two…

And what’s more, even if her job were to involve urgent events, she could have addressed this by applying much better tools than proactively checking her mail throughout her evenings. For example, she could have given those coworkers or customers who might need her instant response her cellphone or home phone number, with the caution that these are only for emergency use. Or she could apply AwayFind (see my previous post on How to avoid email mania without annoying your customers). But her choice of solution had been to embrace the blurring of the Work/Life barrier.

Wrong solution?…

I was at the annual conference of the Israeli Knowledge Management Forum and saw a presentation of a very neat tool, from one of the seemingly countless small startups we have in this country whose creativity never ceases to amaze.

The company is Streamitup, and its product is a complete learning delivery solution based on capture of classroom lectures and their delivery to students on demand at a later time via computer. This in itself is nothing unusual; we see it on YouTube all the time – and it is usually as a fuzzy distance shot of the speaker and the washed-out projection screen that leaves much to be desired. What makes Streamitup so impressive is the fact that the system serves as a Virtual Video Cameraman. You place a camera in the classroom, facing the whiteboard, and the software takes care of all the judgment-intensive actions a human camera professional would do throughout the lecture: zooming and panning to follow the lecturer as he ambles about; showing the content written on the whiteboard; showing any stuff the speaker is demonstrating; and capturing any slides and applications straight from the speaker’s computer.

To illustrate: If the professor writes long lines of text or formulas on the board, the camera will automatically follow him – but with a carefully calculated timing and framing, so what he wrote (and left behind him to his left as he moves to the right) remains visible and legible in the video frame. The output is a navigable composite of the lecturer, the slides, the materials, applications and voice, all in perfect synch and ready to consume by future learners.

Very cool technology!

An argument broke out during one of my lectures, about whether a “No Email Day” could work in the organization I was speaking at. Most attendees felt it couldn’t – not unless the electric power were cut! And then they recalled that this had once happened to them…

Turns out that in a large building power has been lost for a number of hours and all mail was inaccessible. Now, you’d think this would be a negative experience in their memory – but it was not. They all started describing it to me excitedly: how everybody in the building had come out; how they’d all started to talk to each other; and – they reminisced with wonder – how they saw the SUN!

It must’ve been exhilarating. But then, of course, the power had been restored (sigh)…

Love my new Samsung Galaxy S2 – but typing on its touch keyboard is hardly my idea of fun. And the handwriting recognition that came on it reminds me of  the notorious Apple Newton. Oh, how I missed the Graffiti system on my old Palm Pilot!

Graffiti was a stylus-based handwriting system that improved the recognition by replacing some of the harder-to-recognize letter forms with simplified versions, while keeping most characters to a single stroke.  You needed a bit of practice to master it, but this was a minor and worthwhile investment, because the system had excellence performance even on the Palm’s weak processor; and it was a real pleasure to use.

So… in an idle moment I Googled ‘Graffiti for Android‘, and there it was – Drumroll – an exact port of my favorite input method for a handheld device. In two minutes I was up and running! And to my delight I found that the skill of using the Graffiti strokes came back to my finger immediately despite long years of disuse (just like the Morse Code keying skill of my ham radio days from even longer ago).

If you miss your Palm Pilot like I still do, you know this is good news; and if you’re younger than that, give it a try and find out if it works for you!

Sometimes what it takes is to look at oneself in a figurative mirror.

People hear me lecture about Information Overload and the absurd behaviors it makes us adopt, and they light up with recognition; many come to me afterward to share excitedly how they saw their own life in my descriptions. Which is fine and good, but I like to think that at least some of them go on to change their actions and attain a better life as a side benefit of having had this mirror put in front of them.

I first saw this effect long ago when my daughter, then six years old, was in the habit of watching a great deal of television (we were living in the US at the time, where TV cable channels were abundant to the point of absurdity). At some point I grew concerned – there is after all more to life than sitting through commercials to get at programming that was itself of mixed value. So I had an idea: I asked the kid to make a list of all the programs she was in the habit of watching routinely, and how long they ran.

Guess what: the list was indeed worrying in its extent, but I didn’t have to do anything about it: the girl took one look at it and resolved to cut back on her TV time. She hadn’t realized how far she’d gone into couch potato mode. She’s a smart one, then as now; all she needed was this mirror to see what she was doing.

People who succumb to addictive email checking should take a hard look at their behavior pattern – how much time they’re putting into this, how little value results from it, and what they’re giving up in exchange. Then they should draw the conclusions like that six year old…

The Information Overload Research Group’s Overloaded 2012 event in San Francisco was fully successful!  Two dozen information overload crusaders from a diversity of domains – academic, industry, consulting, analyst and the public sector – came together, exchanged research results, viewpoints and opinions, and formed friendships and plans for future cooperation.

We heard two interesting keynotes: Prof. David Levy of  the University of Washington spoke about “Educating for Acceleration and Overload”, and Jonathan Spira, IORG’s VP of research and CEO of Basex, shared his new research results on Information Overload.

This un-conference model – an informal meeting of like minds -  is clearly working, and is easier to orchestrate than a full blown formal conference;  the IORG leadership team plans to hold similar meets once or twice a year in various locations.

I’ve reported before on the policy of leaving Blackberries outside meeting rooms… and now I’ve heard of a policy that tops that.

An attendee approached me after my lecture on Email Overload solutions today and told me that in the advertising agency where she works it is forbidden to bring notebook computers into meetings. She used to find this objectionable, but having heard me explain the damage of checking email to the effectiveness of meetings, she could now understand why it was a good idea after all. Being in advertising, where their meetings were about hammering out creative ideas, they could not afford to have meeting attendees sitting in the all too common zombie-like inattention that goes with “doing email”.

Good thinking!

Even if you’re truly effective in  screening unnecessary information, the fact remains that you need time to deal with incoming online information, whether it’s push-mode info (primarily email) or pull-mode info (e.g. RSS feeds). The question is, where does the time come from?

Someone pointed out once that you can successfully manage your RSS feeds, blog updates, Twitter, Facebook, and so on if you give up watching TV. And indeed, giving up television would give many people a significant chunk of time to devote to their online data consumption. TV being what it is, one could argue that it’s a good tradeoff; however, TV isn’t the only data stream you can drop: there is also reading books. And while not reading a newspaper can be harmless if you read the same news online, not reading books is cause for concern.

It seems that it’s all a matter of each individual making their own choice of how to balance these various information streams. Unfortunately, the Internet tends to be rather more assertive in claiming our attention, and its use can become addictive. Books may find it hard to stand up to this competition. They’ve already taken a hit by the arrival of television in the last century; how they’ll fare against the Net remains to be seen. And they also face another problem – with the shrinking attention span of the younger generation, many people no longer have the patience for those longer classic novels like War and Peace…

Let’s hope books survive these changing times!