Archive for the 'Analysis and Opinion' Category

Who stole our reading time?

Posted on February 3rd, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Novelist Alan Bissett wrote a fascinating post in The Guardian’s books blog, titled Who stole our reading time? It points out explicitly what we all experience: we read less today than ever before. And I’m not complaining about the young generation; I’m comparing now and then within the same generation, whether mine or Bissett’s (who is about a generation younger than me). The basic observation is that nobody has the time, or the will, or the ability, to finish books the size of War and Peace anymore; or to read the voluminous classics of centuries past at all. Bissett links.. Read more

Email overload: snowflakes or terror birds?

Posted on December 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster. But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to.. Read more

So, is a Blackberry a pro or con for WLB?

Posted on November 29th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was interviewed by a journalist about Information Overload recently and she asked whether I agree that having a smart phone helps people to balance work and home life? My first reaction would be “yes, if you use it wisely”. After all, when we deployed Notebook computers at Intel in the mid-nineties it was eminently obvious that they can be a boon for one’s Life: instead of staying late at the office to finish your work, you could take it home to do after dinner, with the kids safely in bed… and of course, Notebooks enabled Telecommuting, which (at a.. Read more

The way we were: messaging before the email overload era

Posted on November 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A friend in a US Hi-tech company once commented to me that all this business communication that is manifesting itself as email overload is nothing new: we also had this in the days before email, even if it used paper instead of computer screens. We called it Correspondence, he said. And then he added: We devoted a couple of hours a week to it; the rest of the time, we worked… The difference, of course, is that then, it took two hours a week, where today – the data shows – it takes ten times as much. That’s the problem… Read more

A fine distinction about Multitasking

Posted on November 9th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A common fallacy I encounter repeatedly is that people – at any rate, the younger ones – are able to “Multitask”, that is, attend to multiple actions at once. Since the problem of interruptions in the workplace (and beyond) is a major component of Information Overload, this fallacy is supposed to be comforting. Unfortunately, it is a myth (to borrow from the succinct title of Dave Crenshaw’s book, The myth of multitasking). Discussing the subject with a friend, she made the point that what people are really doing when they “multitask” is spend some minutes doing one thing, then spend.. Read more

How much information?

Posted on November 5th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Am in the US, where I gave a lecture in an interesting conference called “Information Growth. Is it what you think it is? – How much information 2009 summit”, organized by the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD. The summit was held to present first results from the “How Much Information?” (HMI) research program, which is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven hi-tech companies. The research program works to quantify the amount of information that flows into the homes and workplaces of people in this day and age, and to understand how it is divided between different.. Read more

Email Overload and The Little Prince

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Email Overload is one affliction that people accept more or less willingly. Nobody’s holding a gun to their head, after all. So why are knowledge workers doing this to themselves? We’ll be discussing many causes in this blog, but today I want to probe a remark made by a friend: he observes many knowledge workers who feel that getting lots of email enhances their status. Basically they’re saying “Watch me – I’m important, I get lots of mail and I’m busy handling all of it!” This absurd position reminds me of a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s immortal “The Little.. Read more

To attach, or not to attach?

Posted on October 27th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

There I was, flying across the Atlantic and blogging. Continental now have AC power under every seat, so I could use my notebook as long as I wanted; and the first thing I did was clean out my email. Except for the few messages that included a URL and a description intriguing enough to make me want to check the full article they pointed at. For that I had to wait to be on Terra Firma. It would’ve been better had the senders pasted the entire article. Which reminds me that some years ago, the idea of sending pointers instead.. Read more

Kinds of Information Overload

Posted on October 18th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

My own background as a hi-tech cube dweller biases my perception of Information Overload to the aspect that is most immediately painful to engineers and managers in the industry: Email Overload. Indeed, the impact of the scores or hundreds of incoming message these folks receive daily is so painful that they’re seldom aware of the second major kind of overload that is complementary to email: Interruptions, the distracting beeps, bleeps and squawks of mobile phones, Blackberries, and incoming email. In fact, as we’ve computed at Intel, Interruptions are a bigger time sink than email; but they don’t accumulate like mail.. Read more

Does email really lead to suicide?

Posted on October 16th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A few weeks ago there was a spate of blog posts and tweets asking “Does email lead to suicide?” At the basis of this were reports that the management of France Telecom was taking action to stave a wave of employee suicides. One of the less sensationalist reports about this is this one, in The Independent; and even this one is titled “Exec: Email is causing killer stress”. So – is it true? As to the facts (an oft neglected little matter, facts): turns out that a France Telecom official was commenting on a series of employee suicides in that.. Read more