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Happy Information Overload Awareness Day!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 19, 2011
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

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!

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    Bye bye, E!

    Published
    by
    Nathan Zeldes
    on October 12, 2011
    in Analysis and Opinion
    . 0 Comments

    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?

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      They’re taking over! (In a good way)

      Published
      by
      Nathan Zeldes
      on October 3, 2011
      in Off-topic
      . 3 Comments

      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! :-)

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        Tribute to a favorite bookseller

        Published
        by
        Nathan Zeldes
        on September 29, 2011
        in Off-topic
        . 0 Comments

        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.

        Borders Bookmark

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          Cues for useless email?

          Published
          by
          Nathan Zeldes
          on September 28, 2011
          in Organizational Solutions
          . 0 Comments

          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…

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            A sorely needed cellphone feature

            Published
            by
            Nathan Zeldes
            on September 21, 2011
            in Individual Solutions
            . 2 Comments

            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?

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              How ignorance can lead to Information Overload

              Published
              by
              Nathan Zeldes
              on September 13, 2011
              in Analysis and Opinion
              . 0 Comments

              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!

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                The innocence of youth

                Published
                by
                Nathan Zeldes
                on September 4, 2011
                in Analysis and Opinion
                . 1 Comment

                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…

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                  Some powerful role modeling

                  Published
                  by
                  Nathan Zeldes
                  on August 25, 2011
                  in Organizational Solutions
                  . 0 Comments

                  Here is a wonderful example of how a manager can drive the battle on Information Overload in person.

                  A manager of a large tech company told me that he is personally very intent on making his company “quiet” in the direct sense of doing away with the endless ringing and loud conversations that the ubiquitous use of cellphones has brought into the open office spaces in his plant. This is of course wise, because the constant distraction by the phones of one’s coworkers is known to be a major disruptive factor in creative thinking, productivity and quality of work.

                  So what does he do about it? Many things, but the one I enjoyed most is this: every batch of new hires in the company goes through “New Hire Training”’, and the general manager gives the opening welcome lecture there. And at the beginning of the lecture, as the very first thing the excited new recruits hear, and from the most senior manager in the company at that, he pulls out a cellphone and asks the audience who has one. Of course they all raise their hands. He then tells them that if they expect a personally urgent message from their family or some such, they may keep the phone on and react to it when it rings by leaving the room quietly to respond. All others he asks to turn the things off – and he shows them that his own instrument is switched off as well.

                  Wayda go!

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                    Now, Facebook has its medals!

                    Published
                    by
                    Nathan Zeldes
                    on August 15, 2011
                    in Analysis and Opinion and Off-topic
                    . 0 Comments

                    One common response to mention of Facebook among the Gen X and Baby Boomer (in other words, over 30) crowd is the disdainful “Why would I want people to know what I had for breakfast?!”  Use of Facebook, these people declare, is shallow and silly.

                    Now, it is true that many people – and not just youngsters – post to their Facebook stream rather unimportant  snippets from their daily routine; and their Friends on the service can ignore it or react to it with equally inane comments. But that’s hardly unique to Facebook; people getting together in a bar or a pub seldom pronounce earth-shaking insights either. So what’s the problem?

                    Which reminds me of that wonderful hobby of my youth, Amateur radio. Of course that was also about Geekdom, and homebrewing complex electronic gear; but it also involved sitting up late nights pounding at a Morse key to set up contact with like-minded “hams” from remote lands. And you know what? With few exceptions, what we discussed was our locations, antennas, weather conditions and quality of reception. Even more boring than what we had for breakfast. Yet no one criticized us as shallow or silly!

                    Why not? Perhaps because we had our medals, so to speak: everyone knew that radio hams were an indispensable asset to their community at times of crisis or natural disaster. Everyone knew of some ship or mountaineering expedition that was saved through a diligent amateur operator’s efforts. True, these cases were rare, but they earned our hobby respect.

                    And now, at last, Facebook is earning its own medals as a beneficial force in society. In the past year Facebook is increasingly seen to impact the affairs of nations; most visibly in the “Arab spring” revolutions in the Islamic world, but also in less violent situations. In Israel it is being used by the current grassroots protest movements seeking to restore sanity to food prices, increase housing availability, and revise the national priorities to focus on greater social equality and justice. Non-violent as they are, they already have a huge impact; and they all began as a call for protest in a Facebook page started by a young individual. A month later, the government is trembling in the face of the hugest demonstrations the nation has ever seen, and much hopeful change is in the air.

                    So… next time someone tells you that Facebook is about what one ate for breakfast, remind them that it has earned its medals, and the right to talk about breakfast if it wishes – in between overthrowing tyrants and channeling nationwide protests. Saving sinking ships is nothing in comparison!

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