Archive for the 'Impact and Symptoms' Category

Email Overload and Organizational structure

Posted on May 16th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was discussing email overload with two VPs in a hi-tech company, and one of them   shared the observation that he had been suffering from heavy email loads until an auspicious event happened: he had appointed a more junior person to manage part of his activity, and the overload disappeared. Of course one hopes he had good cause to appoint the subordinate to the role, other than to ease his own Inbox nightmare; but even so, it is interesting to consider what has been talking place here. There can be a number of mechanisms at play: The VP had been.. Read more

A sad vignette of family life in the email era

Posted on May 5th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today: One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed: I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time. A lovely domestic  tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload. By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once.. Read more

The price of extreme mobility

Posted on April 16th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

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.. Read more

Our evolving attention span

Posted on March 25th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

One obvious aspect of this hectic day and age is that people’s attention span is much shorter than it used to be. As has been pointed out before, almost nobody reads books the length of War and Peace anymore… With all the media around us moving to shorter and shorter sound bytes and communication  happening in SMS messages and tweets, it would be natural to speculate that the cause of the shortening attention span is the influence – one can even say manipulation – of all these media. And yet it seems to go beyond a simple reaction; because there.. Read more

Does Local Culture impact email style?

Posted on March 10th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was lecturing on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and when I got to the part about “write succinct, terse, clear mails” an attendee raised his hand to ask me, how would that be perceived by recipients in the United Kingdom? Turns out that they had a workshop on global cultural gaps and it included the notion that the British like to start with small talk and only get to the point later; so they ought to find very short emails rude! Good point, that. Having also worked in a global corporation, I am very much aware of the.. Read more

Do not disturb! Doctors’ visit in progress!

Posted on February 22nd, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the  ward – the.. Read more

Is there a downside to Quiet Time?

Posted on December 13th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was lecturing at Ben Gurion University about Information Overload, and one attendee challenged me with this question: has the cost of disconnecting from the continuous barrage of communications been quantified? What he meant was this: the accepted wisdom in the Info Overload community is that it is advisable to take time out, “Quiet Time”, pre-assigned time slots in the workday when you don’t pull in incoming messages and calls and try to secure some isolation from interruptions. This allows one to get a stretch of concentrated focused thinking, which can do wonders for creativity, quality and effectiveness. But, as.. Read more

Overloaded child/parent communications

Posted on November 29th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

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.. Read more

Keep your hands on the wheel!

Posted on October 24th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

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.. Read more

A good definition of Multitasking

Posted on October 13th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was lecturing about Information Overload and multitasking recently, and told my audience how the research data shows that trying to multitask makes you less efficient at each of the tasks you try to do in parallel. After the lecture, one attendee came up to me and gave me a lovely definition she had for Multitasking: Multitasking is a way to screw up a number of different things at once. I just had to share this gem with you!