Tag Archive for 'handheld'

We have a generation gap to bridge!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 30, 2012
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

I’ve reported a number of cases where managers (most famously, Barack Obama)  implement an interrupt-free environment by mandating a “no cellphones” policy in meetings. While I wholeheartedly applaud this behavior, I must in all fairness report a dissenting viewpoint.

I was talking to a Gen Y worker whose company  had launched such a ban, and he told me that he thought it was not a good idea at all, because his millennial generation needed the cellphones to work, he said! To his mind, having a coworker without a cellphone in ringing mode meant they were inaccessible, and hence unavailable to help him get his job done.

This is interesting. It isn’t that the younger set are unaffected by interruptions and information overload; there is ample evidence that they are, and my bet is that they pay a price just like their elders. But unlike the Boomer and Gen X population, these younger folks weigh the pros and cons differently; to them, ubiquitous communication is a part of their lifestyle both on and off the job, and they feel at a loss without it.

Looking at the bigger picture, I’d say that the real goal should be to strike a better balance between communication and concentration that will benefit everybody, Gen Y and Boomers alike. We need a balance because we can’t simply disconnect them and let them work in their diverse methods.  They may have different expectations, but they share the same work environment and the same message flow; they can’t each choose their preferred work style in isolation. Finding a work culture that works for everybody, and that drives nobody nuts, will be a worthy challenge for the coming years.

Volkswagen shields its employees from its own Blackberries

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 24, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

The proliferation of Blackberries and similar Smartphones has contributed significantly to the erosion of the Work/Life barrier, and has caused knowledge Workers to assume – erroneously, perhaps, but with conviction – that they must be on call 24×7. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly among my clients: people send and receive emails at all hours, and make a habit of checking their Blackberry every few minutes. Convincing these people to stop this addictive behavior is hopeless: I’ve run an experiment along these lines a few years back with a group of engineers and despite all exhortations to the contrary their behaviors remained the same.

Now we read about a bold move by a company that has decided to take responsibility for this problem. Car maker Volkswagen has interrupted the flow of distracting messages at the source; they’ve disabled the move of email messages to the Blackberry servers 30 minutes after the end of formal work hours, and until 30 minutes before the next workday begins. This will bring about  what I like to call a “Technology assisted behavior change”: one that uses a technological component to make it impossible to violate a required behavior.

It’s encouraging to see that Volkswagen values its employees’ Work/Life balance and is willing to take an affirmative step to protect their personal time. In addition to being the right and  moral thing to do, it is a smart move as well – employees that can relax after hours with their families will be much more focused and productive at work. It’s a Win/Win, and I hope other companies will take note. The fact that they involved the employees in defining this move is significant and should help this succeed.

Let me know if your own organization would consider this!

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?

The iPad is mightier than the pen

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 7, 2011
in Off-topic
. 1 Comment

It has been remarked that younger people tend not to wear watches, because their ubiquitous cellphones and other computing devices make them superfluous (interestingly, this brings back the action of having to fish something out of your pocket to read the time -  a throwback to the Victorian pocket watch, without the chain!). But I’ve just been informed of another victim to portable computing, and it goes back much earlier than the watch.

I was talking to a friend who is also a consultant and he told me that in his workshops the attendees often sit with iPads and other devices that they use to capture notes – and, no doubt, to peek at their emails. He then added an interesting observation: when he asks them to fill some observations on a paper form he hands them, many people ask to borrow a pen.

Turns out that with the growing presence and usage of iPads and handhelds, people use those to take notes, write down phone numbers, or maintain shopping lists – so many of them just stopped carrying pens on their person! The essential geek icon of the eighties, the pocket protector bristling with pens, pencils and markers, is long gone; now even a simple pen is slowly becoming history.

Ubiquitous items of daily life do slide into oblivion at some point (I’ve posted a collection of older ones here), but it is always sad to see another one fall by the roadside of progress…

Respect and Telephony

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 30, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

A manager at a small company told me over coffee of a job interview she gave a young candidate, in the middle of which he received a cellphone call from his wife (who wanted, with the wrong timing, to wish him luck in the coming interview).

I was curious how this had affected her attitude to the candidate. After all, on one hand, it is nice that he’d answer his wife – he proved to be a considerate spouse. Yet on the other hand he had interrupted the interview and did not have the courtesy to either shut the phone down (or silence it) before the interview, or to ignore it once it rang. He was showing respect to his wife, and disrespect to his potential employer.

The manager told me she did not let the incident count against the young fellow, but she did think he was being immature. I think that for my part, I’d be less forgiving in this case – I’d interrupt a friendly conversation myself for a phone call I care about, but not a formal meeting like an interview. After all, there are two people involved – the one phoning you and the one talking to you; why give the interrupter priority over the one in your presence? Isn’t it rude? It’s the same attitude you meet at the bank, when the clerk serving you keeps devoting time to phone calls from other clients – ignoring the fact that you had patiently waited in line: why are the callers more important, you can’t help thinking?

And I think a key problem here is that we don’t really have good etiquette norms in place. Other areas of social interaction have evolved more slowly, and there are accepted Do’s and Don’ts covering them. Not so cellular telephony, where anything goes.

Maybe it’s time to take stock and create the missing rules of etiquette?
What do you think?

The price of extreme mobility

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 16, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages.

This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of the use of these little wonders is that the quality of the interaction has suffered a good deal. This is because when you receive a message of moderate or larger size on a PC, you typically read or scan the entire body text, check out the attachments if needed,  then make an informed reply. On a BlackBerry, by contrast, the tiny screen causes people to read only the top of the message, ignore the attachments, and shoot off a quick reply without having absorbed the full message with all its content and nuances. These messages, he said, are very easy to identify as being from a handheld device – they clearly transmit the fact that the sender hasn’t read the message in any depth before replying.

Of course, there is one case where this is acceptable: when the exchange is of terse one-liners, as in “Can we push the meeting to 5PM?” – “Yes“. In these cases, being able to communicate on the go is very valuable and the medium is well suited to the message. Not so with longer messages, which end up requiring further exchanges for clarification, adding to the overall information overload.

Perhaps we need a separate mailing paradigm for handheld and computer – use the handheld only without attachments and in short bursts of communication, and reserve replies to  longer messages for the PC… but of course, the temptation – some say, addiction – of cleaning out one’s email in real time is too strong to allow such distinctions to catch on… :-(

Overloaded child/parent communications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 29, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

I remember how as a small child in the fifties my family would go on Saturday to lunch at my grandma’s. It was quite a tiring walk across town (we had no car then) and it had occurred to me that as we had no telephone either, there was no way to cancel the get together if there was an unexpected need. But of course there wasn’t; life moved much more sedately then, and the meal would be waiting for us time after time. There was little need of frequent communication.

That was then. Now, we were having dinner at a restaurant with some friends when their cellphone rang. It was one of their kids with some minor query. After a while, their cellphone rang again.  It was another of their kids with some minor query. After a while, their cellphone rang yet again.  It was the third of their kids with some minor query.

Of course, parents do like to be in touch with their kids, but this made me wonder: what impact do cellphones have on the child/parent link? These days practically every child, and every parent, carries these little wonders of radio communications. In the past, when landlines ruled, a parent might ring home once during an evening out, to check with the babysitter. Today, communications flow far more frequently, in this case interrupting the parents’ evening rather than the child’s. Such constant communication would have been neither possible nor necessary until quite recently.

So what do you think - is this a change for the better or for the worse?

How to politely respond to a cellphone in a meeting?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 9, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

Now that we live in a reality where we’re interrupted by a cellphone call a few times every hour, it is inevitable that people ring us even while we’re in an important business meeting. The question becomes, then, how do we react to the ring while remaining polite?

This was not a problem back in that ancient era – say, 25 years ago – when business people had something called an office, which had a door, and a secretary that could be asked not to transfer calls. But today we meet in coffee shops as often as in walled rooms, and secretaries are a rare breed. We need to decide what to do about interfering calls – which, of course, may involve important business in themselves.

There are many strategies to choose from:

  1. We can turn the phone off.
  2. We can leave it on but switch it to its Silent (“vibrate”) profile; then we can take a peek at the caller ID when we sense it coming to life and ignore the call unless it’s vital.
  3. We can let it ring audibly, taking a peek at the caller’s ID and hitting “reject” unless it’s vital.
  4. We can take one or two calls early in our meeting, and then turn it off or make it Silent.
  5. We can answer select calls, apologizing to the person we’re meeting with “Pardon, but this is important”, or “this is X, excuse me but I must take it” (where X is the wife, the kid’s kindergarten teacher, or the president of the United States – whoever we deem is unquestionably deserving in the other’s eyes).
  6. We can answer every single call, without so much as an apology.

So which strategy is best from an etiquette perspective? There is no one right answer. Sure, ideally you’d take option 1; after all, the caller will then leave a voice mail or Text you. But in the real world we juggle so many responsibilities that we may have a valid need to be reachable in case of a real emergency. The last option on the list is utterly rude, however many people adopt it. This leaves the middle four, which all combine a degree of screening with use of various degrees of silencing.

To my mind, what really matters is the perception of the person you’re with. Take option 4: the act of firmly turning the phone off after it rang a few calls says “Oh, this is really too much; my conversation with you is more important to me than these other people that are calling me“. In a sense it transmits a friendlier message than just coming to the meeting with the phone already off. Similarly, answering only calls from your wife (or the president) – and making sure to point out the caller – makes the other guy feel that maybe he’s not as dear to you as your spouse, but he’s is still above everyone else. It feels good.

I guess what this goes to is differentiation: you don’t answer the infernal device indiscriminately – you make it clear to the other person that some calls must come through, but only the really important ones you can’t defer; the rest you visibly reject because you have respect for your real life conversation and its participants.

As has been often remarked… it’s the thought that counts!

Keep your hands on the wheel!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 24, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

The silly, if cheerful, pop song from the fifties, “Seven little girls“,  gives us the chorus:

All together now, one, two, three / Keep your mind on your driving / Keep your hands on the wheel / Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead / We’re having fun, sitting in the backseat / Kissing and a hugging with Fred!

A somewhat improbable notion, considering that there were seven girls (plus Fred) in the back seat; but it has an important lesson: the driver should keep his mind on the driving, his eyes on the road, and – most obvious – his hands on the wheel!

And yet this is far from obvious in today’s info-starved, comm-crazed culture. Today’s drivers may not be distracted by amorous exploits in the back seat; after all, most of us drive alone to work. But we have plenty of distraction from our mobile devices.

In the beginning this meant cellphones, and many countries hurried to legislate the mandatory use of a hands-free device to at least keep the driver’s hands on the wheel (pay heed, gentle reader; the use of a cellphone while driving is a serious risk factor for traffic accidents).

But then the problem shifted to a far more dangerous use model: typing and driving. Much of this involves Texting; Prof. Paul Atchley of the University of Kansas spoke about this in the Information Overload Awareness Day event last week and his research shows that 95% of young adults text and drive; and they often text with both hands on the device. This is scary, especially given that  young drivers already have a high accident risk. Many states have enacted laws against this too.

So now I hear of an even scarier culprit: email. I was lecturing on Info Overload when a man in the audience told us that he has a friend that “from the length of his replies I can tell how fast he’s driving”. To our amazement he added that this friend once included in a message an apology for the brevity of his reply, expressly attributing it to the fact that he’s driving.

Don’t. Do. That!

The Dawn of the Blackberry Era

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 3, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

Today RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is even more chock-full of amazing technology than the model before it, which was itself ahead of its predecessor, which was…

This has been going on for a long time, but it reminds me that the sequence did have a beginning – yes, there was a first BlackBerry, which had perhaps appeared, fully formed, from the primordial chaos…

I collect items from the History of Computing, and I have a sample of that earliest BlackBerry, the model 950, introduced in 1998, which you see in this photo.

BlackBerry 950 - the original BlackBerry

The interesting thing is that this model precedes the addiction that has earned its successors the nickname “CrackBerry”. It had a unique usage model: it was really an advanced pager, not a telephone, and its primary use was to page people in your organization, not to process email. It did have email, but the tiny screen tended to limit its use to urgent stuff only. The text based paging, however, was quite useful: I remember on the very day that I was given one of these – as an early adopter – I left my sweater in a conference room and rather than backtrack across campus I could text a friend in the room to collect it for me. The use of such real time communication-on-the-go, at a time before cellphones became ubiquitous, became immediately evident to me. The tiny keyboard that gave the device its imaginative name (the keys look like the bumps on a blackberry fruit) and the thumb wheel for scrolling were already present, and remained hallmarks of the RIM devices for years; that thumbwheel was extremely natural and easy to use, and I still regret its passing…

BlackBerry 957Of course, the tiny screen was soon replaced with the full size we expect today: the model 957 in the photo at right is from the year 2000 (Y2K, remember?) and allowed one to process email comfortably, opening the door to the email addiction I help companies fight these days. The pager function would soon disappear and cellular telephony would be added in 2002, giving us the smartphone paradigm we’re so used to these days.

But it all started as a humble pager with a tiny screen…