Tag Archive for 'information overload'

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?

The decay to the rest state

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 4, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 2 Comments

Happy independence day to our American friends!…

Today I want to draw your attention to a phenomenon that is quite familiar to us physicists, but has a place in driving solutions to information overload as well. I refer to the decay to a rest state.

In physics, this is often seen when a system is pushed up to a high energy state: it will lose energy and “decay” to its state of equilibrium. Thus, a mug of hot coffee – a critical item in a knowledge worker’s routine – will lose heat and eventually reach room temperature if you don’t drink it promptly. You need to pump in energy continuously, perhaps by keeping it on a Mug Warmer, to keep it hot.

So how does this apply to Information Overload? Actually it applies to most efforts to change organizational behavior by one initial push. Say you deploy a training program to educate your group to improve their email behavior. Experience shows that what will happen is this: at first, people will be energized by all the new ideas and motivated to apply them. Email effectiveness will go up, work will be more efficient, and people may even get to go home early and see their children awake. But then, as the months pass by, the behaviors will start to decline, and after a year or two everything may go back to where it started – high load, low effectiveness, and devastated Work/Life balance. The equilibrium state…

You see it happen in many programs. Prof. Leslie Perlow reports seeing this decay, within 6 months, at the end of her famous “Quiet Time” pilot, described in her book “Finding Time”. I’ve also seen it happen with a number of training programs we’ve launched at Intel over my career. This decay is a strange phenomenon because there is nothing to be gained by it; everyone is worse off in the “rest state”. So why do smart workers allow it to happen?

Prof. Perlow ascribes this to the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive change in all the related cultural aspects: if the underlying causes of a destructive behavior pattern remain, they will drive people back to where they were. In addition, there is the simple fact that many modern organizations are in a state of constant churn, with reorganizations, mergers, and personnel movement causing new people to come and others to leave a group, diluting the learned lessons. And if a senior manager who was supportive of a change is replaced with one who is not, subordinates will instantly respond to the new manager’s priorities.

So what can we do? For starters, it is important to try and integrate the desired practices as deeply and widely as possible into the organizational culture, affording them protection from the buffeting currents of short-term change. And as long as management remains supportive, you can simply do what the mug warmer does – pump in new energy, that is, maintain the desired state by providing ongoing leadership, role modeling, and periodic refresher training. This last is not expensive, and should be considered as a requirement when you plan a deployment of a training-based program in Info Overload space.

Five characteristics of Information Overload in Small Businesses

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 6, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 4 Comments

Last week I lectured on Information Overload at a seminar for small business entrepreneurs. This is a very diverse, lively and interesting population segment, brimming with energy and originality. I had an interesting time talking to people making a living from areas as different as marriage (and, alas, divorce) counseling, organic food production, web site development, optometry, software coding and interior design. These people were young and old, male and female, technically trained or not; but they had one thing in common: all were victims of massive Information Overload.

Which is strange, in a way: you’d think someone running a small home-based business would be less affected than a corporate cube dweller. And yet there they were, expressing the same struggles and losing battles against overflowing Inboxes as any hi-tech engineer or manager.

And yet, there are subtle differences, so I tried to understand and address in my lecture the specific aspects of the problem in a small or home business setting. Below I list what I came up with, and I seek your input to extend or modify this list:

  • In an enterprise, where most email is internal, you have access to – and control of – both senders and recipients, so you can set expectations for both, and train the senders to write effective emails. This is important because by dealing with a sender you can cure the problem at the source. In a small business you don’t have any control of the people who send you email, all you can do is cope better with the symptoms they generate.
  • Small businesspeople face serious issues with Time Management, which these days is closely linked to Email and the Tasks it brings with it. The greater flexibility they enjoy comes with greater opportunities for losing track of time.
  • In addition to Email Overload, these workers perceive a serious problem with how to stay professionally updated without spending all day at it. Of course we all seek knowledge online, but  in a company there is the supporting framework of a formal training curriculum; at home you’re on your own, and the endless content of the blogosphere, just a mouse click away, is hard to resist.
  • Some Small Businesses actually suffer from Spam, I was surprised to learn. This is because they don’t have the protection afforded corporate users by the filters installed at the gateway by an IT group, and many lack the knowledge to install the filtering themselves.
  • Unlike corporate knowledge workers, who have access to team-wide knowledge stores, in a SMB you need to manage, file and retrieve all your information locally and alone. You don’t have anyone managing SharePoint repositories you can use, after all.

So – do you run a small business? Have I missed anything you can add to this list? Leave a comment to share!

Last week I lectured on Information Overload at a seminar for small business entrepreneurs. This is a very diverse, lively and interesting population segment, brimming with energy and originality. I had an interesting time talking to people making a living from areas as different as marriage (and, alas, divorce) counseling, organic food production, web site development, optometry, software coding and interior design. These people were young and old, male and female, technically trained or not; but they had one thing in common: all were victims of massive Information Overload.

Which is strange, in a way: you’d think someone running a small home-based business would be less affected than a corporate cube dweller. And yet there they were, expressing the same struggles and losing battles against overflowing Inboxes as any hi-tech engineer or manager.

And yet, there are subtle differences, so I tried to understand address in my lecture the specific aspects of the problem in a small or home business setting. Below I list what I came up with, and I seek your input to extend or modify this list:

Yes it IS Information Overload, Clay Shirky, not only Filter Failure

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 18, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 10 Comments

You can see it on Twitter every day, a year and a half after he coined it: Clay Shirky’s famous Filter Failure meme,

“It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”.

It’s catchy. It’s thought-provoking. And yet, I believe, it’s also misleading.

This meme started with an excellent keynote Clay gave at Web 2.0 Expo NY in late 2008, and I strongly recommend you watch the video if you haven’t already: it’s very insightful and interesting. If you’re too overloaded to spend 23 minutes, some of the ideas are also in a CJR interview here.

To sum it up, Clay says Information Overload is not new; it’s been around since antiquity, and really took off with Gutenberg’s printing press. But in the print era, a publisher had to filter what to publish, because it cost them up front and might not sell; this filtered the available information at the source. The Internet introduced “Post-Gutenberg economics”: it’s now possible to publish anything for free, so the filter is gone. Therefore, there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, which we should solve by developing new and better filtering paradigms.

Which makes a lot of sense, except that I’ve spent the past 15 years of my professional life helping knowledge workers who are driven to distraction by a very obvious and real affliction they call Information Overload. So how can Mr. Shirky, a leading expert, say it’s not even a problem?

On one level, it may just be a logical error: just because A is caused by B doesn’t mean that A isn’t a real problem. The Black Death was caused by flea-carrying rats; yet no one would say “It wasn’t a terrible plague, it was a pest-control failure”. It was a very real plague caused by failure to kill the rats; and Information Overload is a very real problem caused (in part) by Filter Failure.

More importantly, I think Clay and I define “Information Overload” – the “It” in the meme – differently. As he states in the CJR article, “[having] more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime… is almost the definition of information overload”. If this is the definition, then I agree it isn’t a problem – and certainly not THE problem – at all. Who cares if there’s a lot of information in a library, as long as you don’t have to read it all?

The problem of Information Overload as I see it, the one that’s robbing millions of people of their productivity, sanity and quality of life, is definitely new, going back to the proliferation of email in the nineties. It is not that there’s a lot of information; it is that there’s a lot more information that we are expected to read than we have time to read it in. It’s about the dissonance between that requirement and our ability to comply with it, and this requirement was not there in Alexandria or in Gutenberg’s Europe: you were free to read only what you wanted to and had time for. This is what has changed, not just the filtering. Take email: the real problem isn’t spam, which is easily dealt with; it’s the scores or hundreds of work-related messages you receive each day, and the fact that replying intelligently to even the fraction that is really important forces many to work late into the night, 7 days  a week. This is an intensely real nightmare for managers, engineers, and many others. And this is why Email Overload is a problem and RSS feed overload is much less so: there is an expectation (express or implied) that you must go through all the mail in your Inbox; there is no such expectation for an RSS reader.

That said, is this problem caused by Filter Failure? To some extent it is: when you had to stuff your mimeographed interoffice memos in envelopes, the inconvenience was a filter; when you got your reprints on paper from the company librarian, that too was a filter. The Reply to All button is a major filter-buster. However, I perceive other causes, as you readers of my blog know. In particular, there are cultural reasons for the abundance of workplace email: CYA, publish or perish, mistrust, escalation, and so on.

So if Clay is simply talking about the “OMG there are so many publications out there I will never read” kind of IO, while I am talking of the “I will never clear this Inbox in time to take my kid to the game” kind, why do I take issue with him? I do so because stating “there is no such thing as information overload” does not make that distinction; it makes it sound like all the people who claim they have an IO  problem are whiners and luddites. It also reduces the motivation to deal with Information Overload, and this leaks over into “my” kind of IO, where such motivation is highly beneficial to people. And lastly, emphasizing that it’s “only” Filter Failure takes attention away from the many solutions that address IO from other angles, such as understanding and changing the underlying workplace culture. Which Clay himself would probably welcome, since he concludes the lecture with the statement that we will need to rethink social norms to fix the issue. Amen to that!

What do you think?

Collecting Manifestations of an Obsession

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 2, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

Knowing my specialization in Information Overload, people around me tend to share stories from their own observations of people submitting to obsessive reading of email 24×7.

For example: one friend reports being at an airport, seeing a family with young children waiting in line with their luggage on a cart. The mother was holding on to the cart, and trying to keep an eye on the kids. The father was banging on a Notebook doing email… (I can imagine that despite this fine proof of the feminine capacity for multitasking, his wife would have preferred to share the burden with him).

For example: a CEO I know marveled at the time he saw in a restaurant a business man dining with what was clearly a client. Then this guy’s Blackberry buzzed in his pocket, and he attended to it even though the conversation with the client must have been far more important.

For example… but I’m sure you have many examples of your own… let’s collect them! Can you share with the rest of us in the comments? The most outrageous case – and you’re welcome to indicate your choice – gets an honorable mention!

Correspondence of yesteryear

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 27, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

Four ways to make Information Overload solutions acceptable to employees

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 3, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Solving Information Overload is one of the highest-ROI actions an enterprise can embark on. With knowledge workers losing about one day a week to this issue, anything that will reclaim them that time is bound to repay itself very rapidly for the company, while improving the victims’ quality of life. There’s just one potential pitfall: some of the organizational solutions available may seem restrictive or oppressive to at least some employees, and that may limit their success. It is important to make the solutions acceptable to the very people they are trying to help!

Here are some ideas for achieving this acceptance:

  1. Involve the employee base from the very start. That may be the biggest predictor of a successful IO program. Announce your intent to tackle the program early, before the solutions are a done deal! In one company I know this was achieved by the organization’s top manager blogging about his intention to address IO in his internal blog, which drew many enthused responses.

    If you set up a team to define solutions, consider including in it employees from all layers in the hierarchy, to give your users a voice.

  2. Collect ideas for solutions from your employees, thereby securing both their help and their commitment, while giving your program visibility. At Intel IT we held an employee contest for ideas, complete with prizes; we got hundreds of submissions, many quite insightful, and the ensuing program was a great success.
  3. If the solution is radical, try it out first in a Pilot team. This carefully chosen and motivated team will be more likely to succeed, and the outcome – if it is positive – will be easier to sell to the rest of the organization.
  4. Be sensitive – and creative! For example, consider the way the VP of Marketing at Veritas software implemented a “No Email on Friday” ban. He went so far as to fine  anyone who sent an email that day with $1. That should have caused a big outcry, but instead it was accepted and fondly remembered years later by the employees as a fun program. How come? Because the VP had the wisdom to have the fines go to charity, and to let the employees decide which charity it would be; and he played the whole thing lightly and with a sense of humor, going so far as to put up “wanted” posters for repeat offenders…

If you have any success stories we can learn from, share them in the comments!

Information Overload: how do we quantify the cost?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 26, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

We grown-ups like to quantify things in numbers, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry charmingly observes in The Little Prince: “If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!””

So, it is no wonder that any fighter against inefficiency in the workplace is often confronted with the demand for quantification of productivity gains. How much is Email Overload costing our company? How much can we save if we eliminate it, in full or in part? There is no perfect answer to these questions, because knowledge worker productivity is notoriously hard to measure (more on this in a future post). How can you provide a figure?

A common approach is to estimate the time wasted on IO and multiply by the average salary in the company to derive a total cost figure. These figures tend to run very high; Basex, a New York analyst firm, famously placed the cost to the US economy at $900B (yes, Billion) a year, derived from a waste of over a day per week per worker. There are a number of questions this leaves open: how do you quantify the time loss? And what will happen if you recover the time? Will productivity (output per employee) soar, or will people just work less, or go home earlier (not a bad thing in itself, in the long term)?

Then there’s the fact that time loss is just the tip of the iceberg, as I and my colleagues showed in an article a while back. The damages of Info Overload go beyond time waste: working in “Continuous partial attention” reduces creativity and innovation, increases error rates, reduces managerial decision quality, and stresses people to the point of illness. So, focusing on the easier to quantify time loss ignores what may well be higher costs: how do you even begin to measure the cost of not having come up with a critical invention? How do you assess the long term effect of employee burnout?

My own approach is to avoid a dollar figure, and instead I always share with my audiences and clients the full picture. I give the time loss – in hours, not dollars – as a lower limit;  we know enough to have a fairly good idea of that number. If their employees are wasting about a day per week, you don’t need the math to realize it would be a good idea to plug this time sink. Then I explain the other loss areas one by one, with enough research data to give the listener an idea of the problem’s magnitude, rather than a dollars and cents number. This way, I find, people tend to “get it” without sidetracking into secondary arguments.

What would you say? Is this more or less effective than attempting a precise calculation?

How info-starved were our ancestors?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 14, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is?

First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of the population was close to illiterate, so many people back then had no use for the printed word, pulling the average down. But they had other information, which was not to be found in books: even the humblest peasant acquired a wealth of information in his lifetime – from how to gauge the best time to plant his field to how to efficiently skin a rabbit, two items that would baffle the vast majority of New Yorkers today (to be fair, the latter also have a good deal of such “tacit knowledge” – how to program a VCR, if anyone still does, for example – that is also absent from the Sunday paper).

But let’s limit ourselves to educated people. Did Newton, or Galileo, or Leibniz, or Descartes, or Shakespeare, or their other cultured contemporaries, access less information in their entire life than fills a single issue of our daily paper?

I haven’t studied the matter rigorously, and I’d love to know if anyone had – but it sounds quite dubious to me even when taken literally in terms of bits and bytes. After all, those old timers invariably did have access to the bible, and I doubt the NYT has more text in it than that venerable book, even if you include the advertising. And when you get right down to it, you also have to consider the value of the information. The phone directory is full of information, after all, yet no one would compare it to Newton’s Principia Mathematica (which was a good deal thinner). And, though more interesting than the white pages, the NYT is no match for the bible either.

Bottom line, unless we measure “information” in the most literal-minded and meaningless way, we should rethink the statement about those poor ancestors: they had plenty of access to intelligent, useful, valuable information that served them well. And they had one major advantage over us: the signal to noise ratio in the information they had was much, much better than what we suffer at present. They actually had to walk (or ride) to get their information in printed form; and it cost them good money. As a result, they only tended to access what they could actually read, chosen by them for its value. By contrast, we have information pushed at us in huge quantities through the Internet, and for free; and most of us lack the self control to filter it properly. That is where the real problem of Information Overload comes from, not the length of the daily paper. One look at my Inbox, and I can’t help but envy Isaac Newton, sitting quietly under his apple tree, thinking, with less information than that in a single edition of the NY Times.

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!