Archive for the 'Analysis and Opinion' Category

Zero benefit email – come and get it!

Posted on February 10th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

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.. Read more

Slower or faster? Email vs. Voice

Posted on February 4th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

When I was a ham radio operator, I could communicate with far away hobbyists using either Voice transmission or Morse Code. You’d think Voice would be the faster means of conversation; after all, the spoken word is faster than the dots and dashes of even the fastest telegraph operator. And yet both modes had their charm – and both took about the same time, because with Morse, we’d use abbreviations and keep the conversation focused and terse in a way not necessary with the luxury of voice. Thus, the question of which mode is faster was far from settled… The.. Read more

Facebook: a third factor in enterprise Information Overload?

Posted on January 13th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

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.. Read more

The ease of getting connected

Posted on January 6th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Welcome to a new decade, promising ever more technological change! Here is one change that came to my mind: I remember, as anyone of my generation does, how you used to have to wait more than a year to have a phone line delivered by the state-run phone monopoly of the time. In fact, after I got married in the mid-seventies and waited a couple of years, I got a shared line with my absent-minded neighbor, who would forget to hang up after conversing… This is now a fading memory; these days, we take it for granted that we can.. Read more

This computer is no friend of mine…

Posted on December 28th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Recently I had occasion to observe a medical expert, a senior professor at a major hospital, as he tried to access a patient’s medical information on the hospital’s computer network. This took a while, and he turned to me and said “As you can see, this computer is no friend of mine”. He then added, apologetically, “Now, if only my grandson were here, he could do this in no time”. Obviously the doctor was of the pre-computer generation, and many would dismiss his difficulty as a natural result of his age. But as I thought it over, it occurred to.. Read more

Why email is more stressful than paper mail

Posted on December 6th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

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.. Read more

The Offense system of Email Overload

Posted on November 24th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was delivering my Information Overload Jump Start workshop to a manager forum and we were discussing the reasons they were sending all those unnecessary messages to each other, when one of the participants made a perceptive comment: “We use”, she said, “the Offense System of addressing email!” What she meant, she elaborated, was that when in doubt you simply copied anyone in the organization who might be offended if you left them out. And since this is the path of caution, you bet they were sending to everybody and his brother – simply to be on the safe side!.. Read more

How to politely respond to a cellphone in a meeting?

Posted on November 9th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

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,.. Read more

The collaboration-killing desk

Posted on September 7th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Collaboration is a crucial aspect of work in most hi-tech companies. Office cubicles, for better or worse, are also present in many of them. You’d think, therefore, that the latter would be designed to facilitate the former… No such luck, however. Consider the most common type of desk seen in the cube farms. Image courtesy GraceFamily, shared on flickr under CC license. The basic concept seems to make sense: the L-shaped desk, bridged at the angle by a diagonal area for the keyboard, allows one to sit facing the screen while having everything else – phone, file trays, drawers, and.. Read more

The problem of Self-induced Interruptions

Posted on August 29th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Recently I was talking to a senior manager about the role of BlackBerry alerts in information overload. The guy was quite aware of the impact, and told me he had turned off all incoming-email alerts on his device. Smart move! Then he added that this move had limited effect because he was in the habit of checking the BlackBerry for new email every few minutes anyway. This is a prime example of self-induced interruptions. People in this day and age are so addicted to the flow of messaging that even absent external interrupts they simply interrupt themselves. This was borne.. Read more