Tag Archive for 'information overload'

All alone in the info-flood

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 6, 2012
in Analysis and Opinion and Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

Although practically every organization is full of knowledge workers groaning under a deluge of email, it’s interesting to note that in many of them I run into a small minority of people who have things under control. I discover them on occasion when I explain the various solutions I can bring in, and someone says “Oh, but I already handle this by…” or “I never do that, I always…”

The things they do vary; my favorite are the rare heroes who tell me they turn off all electronic devices after work hours, but there are many variations. Basically these people have developed, on their own, Individual Coping Strategies that permit them to thrive despite the pressure of information overload. These strategies usually coincide with ones I evangelize, perhaps not surprisingly, but are self-developed from scratch by each such individual.

Now, if only they’d proliferate their methods to the entire organization! Rarely someone does, as I’ve described here, but most of these people are happy to use their methods for themselves without raising awareness to it around them. They’re staying afloat, all alone while those around them struggle in vain against the flood of messages. Their impact is felt, however, when the organization – or a senior leader in it – decides to take action; they can set an example when the time comes for a change.

If you are one of these trailblazers, do share your favorite method in the comments!

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!

The unsung heroes of Information Overload

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 3, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion and Organizational Solutions
. 1 Comment

By now there are many people out there helping others to cope with, and mitigate, information overload. Some, like me in my  previous career as an Intel Principal Engineer, do it because it’s their job and helps their employer. Others, like me in my current consulting career, do it to help our clients. Either way, it’s always been my passion, but you could argue that it’s also a living, and that’s true: we get paid to apply our knowledge and skills on behalf of the companies we help out.

But there is a third type of people who act against the flood of information, and they aren’t paid to do so. I ran into one of them recently at a large Fortune 500. This guy contacted me and asked to discuss my views of email overload; of course I was happy to do so. It turned out, he told me over a cup of coffee, that he’s organizing and delivering lectures on IO that he’s developed himself, to groups of employees all over his company. It wasn’t part of his job, and he did it above his ordinary day job; indeed, given the way people are fully loaded, it probably came at the expense of his meager free time. But he was passionate about freeing his coworkers from the weight of all those countless messages of dubious value, and he went about it with great enthusiasm. He was making a difference.

What this guy was, of course, is a Grassroots Change Agent. Being a change agent is hard enough when you’re a senior engineer with the support of your management; doing it by yourself from below is outright daunting. It is also invaluable; this guy, and the other heroes like him throughout the business world, have my admiration and respect!

Telemarketing Information Overload

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

Today I got a call from a telemarketer who did her best to entice me to subscribe to a certain business journal. I told her I already had a subscription to a similar one, and she went out of her way to explain to me that hers contained that much more – more articles, more pages, more information!

I may be too polite, so she kept going on even after I pointed out that I barely read a tenth of the pages of the journal I already receive; she continued until I decided enough was enough and told her that I make a living by consulting to organizations how to reduce the damage caused their employees by information overload. That left the good woman speechless and she let me be.

And if you think about it, we do receive all these invitations to subscribe to all these magazines – do they really think we’re starved for information here? Marketing newspapers isn’t even like the proverbial selling of refrigerators to Eskimos, since a fridge can at least do no harm; selling people more information is more like selling a plague to the healthy…

Incidentally, before she said goodbye the telemarketer lady had a moment of introspection, and she told me that yes, indeed, free time is a precious commodity, and she can see how too much information can be a problem. Who knows, perhaps I gave her the push that will propel her into a successful career in Information Overload consulting herself? :-)

Yes, I do!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 2, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

An attendee at a lecture at a multinational tech company pointed out to me that part of his problem with email overload stems from situations where he is part of a functional distribution list, say “All Engineering”. Some messages to the entire group he does need, but there are other specific recurrent  messages that other engineers need and he doesn’t. Then when he goes to the sender and asks to get off, he is told it can’t be done – you can’t “unsubscribe” from the list: if you’re an engineer, you are automatically included and cursed for all eternity to receive anything sent to “All Engineering”.

Now, it would be nice if the organization had communication tools that do allow unsubscribing from a list for specific types of messages; such tools can be developed and would certainly be worth the development cost. But until that happens, the issue boils down to this express or implied conversation:

Recipient: I need you to stop sending me the weekly debug report. I’m not involved in debugging.
Sender: Sorry, can’t help you there. I send it to “All Engineering”.
Recipient: Well, can’t you send it to a list of “All Engineering minus myself”?
Sender: You really mean I should craft a special dist list just for your convenience?!?!! Yeah right!

And this is where it ends, one line before the correct ending, which would add:

Recipient: Yes, I do!

This may sound presumptuous to the sender, but the recipient is right: he has every right to expect the sender go to this extra effort. It may take the sender five minutes, a small one-time effort – but it would save the recipient – possibly many of them – recurring distractions and time loss going forward. It is a reasonable request and in the best interest of the organization.

How do you react to such a demand? And, as a recipient, do you have the courage to say, Yes, I do?

Zero benefit email – come and get it!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 10, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion
. 3 Comments

I received a letter (yes, on paper) from Audible.com. I am a happy customer of their audio book service; I pay a fixed modest sum monthly, and receive one “credit” each month, which embodies the right to download one book into my iPod. Their letter tried to sell me on the idea of getting onto their “Email Network”. In other words, grant them permission to send me promotional emails.

I can’t complain – they were kind (and law abiding) enough to ask my permission, after all. But I read the letter and was struck by one of the “benefits” they claimed this arrangement would confer on me. It was “Credit notification – know as soon as your credit arrives“. In other words, they would send me an email when I get each new monthly credit. Which would be very useful if we used an arcane and complex calendar system like the ancient Maya priests had; but with the Gregorian calendar, the new credits arrive once a month, regular as clockwork, and wait in my account until I use them. No mystery. No need to be notified. I can figure out when the month begins without adding to my busy Inbox  a new stream of useless mail.

We have spammers for that, after all…

Facebook: a third factor in enterprise Information Overload?

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

Information Overload can have manifold manifestations: physicians have more new articles coming out in their field than they can possibly cover, consumers have too many TV channels to choose from comfortably, journalists have a hard time staying on top of breaking news, and so forth. But in the enterprise, the domain of the knowledge worker population I belong to and serve, Information Overload took a fairly predictable and well-characterized form, and it had two underlying components: Email Overload and Interruptions (a.k.a. distractions). Until recently, this was it; find a way to handle the hundred or (many) more incoming emails a day, and to keep in check the endless intrusions of BlackBerries and other interrupters, and you could have IO under control.

But in the last year I begin to see signs that a third component may be joining these two: Facebook. I first caught on over a year ago when a senior manager asked me: when is Facebook going to replace email in his company? He had noticed that his kids’ generation don’t bother to maintain an email account; it’s all in Facebook for them. He also noticed that these kids, or their peers, will very soon hit the workplace…

Now, I wouldn’t hold my breath for email to disappear; but there are ever more signs that the arrival of Gen Y in the enterprise will bring with it a growing reliance on both internal and external social networks; and my bet is that any attempt to ban the external ones will be as short-lived as were the attempts to ban the World Wide Web in the mid-nineties. Facebook and similar tools will be part of enterprise life, including personal use, and many people with foresight realize that. The question is, what will this do to Information Overload?

That this is a relevant question I see from the number of people who approach me, after my lectures on IO, and express concern, or seek advice, around Facebook Overload. The temptation to check and update Facebook around the clock may strike Gen X and Boomer workers as silly, but it is the younger people – who already do this in high school – who will matter before long. If Facebook is addictive, they will arrive at the workplace with the habit already established. If so, we IO practitioners will need to add Facebook to the twin factors of email and interruptions, and we will need to have answers and solutions to this new aspect of the old problem.

What do you think? Do share your thoughts on this: will Facebook IO be a problem 5 years from now? Is it a problem already? And what can we do about it?

Why email is more stressful than paper mail

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 6, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I was trying to get my email Inbox down to zero for the weekend, and though I was making good progress, I felt a mounting sense of stress. Realizing this, I stopped to introspect: why stress? Here I was, going down the list of incoming messages, deleting the useless ones and addressing the more important stuff, and generally doing a good job. Why stress, rather than a feeling of accomplishment?

So I examined more closely what I was doing in the process, and I realized that many of the emails were carrying “gifts” of additional activities. One message might direct my attention to a possibly interesting video on YouTube; I’d then go and look at it. The next mail might ask me to attend a seminar, providing a link to the agenda; I’d click the link and go check it out. And maybe I’d need to know where the location was, so I’d go into Google Maps to check that too; then, if I decided to attend, I’d go to another link to confirm, and put an item on my calendar. The next message would be that someone wants to connect to me on LinkedIn; off I’d go to check this person’s profile. And so on.

Compare this to the process of reading incoming mail in the old days. There too you had an Inbox – a tray marked IN – and you’d go down its content item by item. But those items would be much more self-contained. None of them would cause you to branch out to a far away place to check more information; if you needed information, it was right there in the envelope. In today’s multitasking world, you keep making short forays into the infinite Web, jumping from mode to mode, from medium to medium, back and forth… I’m no psychologist, but I suspect that this activity format is part of the reason why email processing is more stressing than just slitting envelopes, reading the content and maybe jotting a directive to one’s assistant (or to oneself) about what to do with it.

What do you think?

The occupational hazards of handling information

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 17, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

Handling stuff has always carried occupational health risks. Back in previous centuries it was physical stuff: if you worked in a coal mine your lungs would get shot; if you lifted product (“16 tons”), your back was at risk; if you dipped matches you’d be poisoned outright… and even dealing with books and ledgers involved the stereotypical “scholarly stoop” or myopic eyes.

In this new century the stuff that matters is information, which is odorless, weightless, and non-toxic; you’d think there would be no hazards associated with its handling. And yet, there are distinct health issues related to Information Work.

The best known culprits are repetitive stress injury (RSI) from typing, and lower back pain from sitting immobile before a screen. These are quite common and can be seriously harmful; some people lose the use of their hands completely for long periods of time, and it can happen without warning. Preventive solutions are simple – ergonomic chairs and workstation setup, wrist support at the keyboard, and of course taking frequent breaks to stretch and rest one’s muscles. Unfortunately many people don’t do this until it is too late; if I were a boy scout I could get my “good deed” credits just from all the times I  tell people to sit correctly. It’s incredible how contorted and unhealthy people’s positions can be – some sink down in their low chairs while looking up at the screen, a pose that reminds me of the position of the “Mayan astronaut” from Palenque…

Then there are the people who insist on using LCD screens at non-optimal resolutions, making the image fuzzy to the detriment of their eyes; and there are those who tote heavy laptops without resorting to a backpack.

But most intriguing, though far from fully understood yet, is the damage to our brains from processing too much information. We’ve known for a while that information overload affects mental acuity in a variety of ways – temporarily; but whether it caused permanent physical changes to the brain’s hardware was unclear. Recent research seems to suggest that such changes actually might occur, as the brain “rewires” itself in response to the hectic information processing mode of today. This is the stuff of Nicholas Carr’s famous article  “Is Google making us stupid?” and his book “The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains” which I plan to grab in my next Amazon order…

So, next time you have a few tons to lift, use your knees (or a fork lift); and next time you log onto your computer, be just as careful!

The curse of being in the know

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 28, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

The desire to “Be in the Know” has no doubt been around since our stone age ancestors had developed language. In addition to the actual value of the information, it meant being close to the seat of power, to where the decisions of the tribe or village or city-state were being made or influenced. It was a heady feeling and a powerful practical tool in social interactions; it could even be a survival skill.

Unfortunately, this desire to share in the flow of information has taken a nasty turn when Information Overload came around. It used to be that in order to know what’s going on you had to connect – socialize – gossip – with the right people; a few would suffice, and you’d get the benefits of the social interaction to boot. Today, we have email and the ‘net, where the available information is infinite, and most of the information is useless to you. Nevertheless, people retain that urge to know as much as possible, and they keep scanning the stream of messages and updates to the exclusion of real human interaction and useful work.

Consider this manager I was interviewing about his email load a while back. I inquired about a given message in his Inbox, and the guy told me it arrives, regular as clockwork, every week. When I pressed for details I was told that the man never read it, not once. Why not get off the distribution, then, I asked – and the indignant reply was “You want me to lose important information?!” The manager didn’t even perceive the absurdity of the situation: the desire to be in the loop, to receive all the information flowing in the organization, was strong enough to blind him to the fact that he had no time for it anyway.

It takes a good deal of willpower to avoid this trap and let go of a large portion of the information one can access. Being in the know is useful when the know is of significance; otherwise it can just add to the clutter and waste inherent in information overload. How about you - are you trying to bite more of the “know” than you can swallow?