Archive for the 'Impact and Symptoms' 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

Preemptive Escalation and Email Overload

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

Being Preemptive is usually good: for example, preemptive maintenance beats reactive repair any day, right? But recently I encountered an organization where people were using Preemptive Escalation. What was going on is that when someone sent a coworker an email asking them to do something, the recipient’s boss would be added to the message, as pressure on the recipient to respond. Of course escalation – letting the boss know that someone is unresponsive – is an old device, and a useful one; but usually it is a second level method, applied after the direct message had failed to achieve its.. Read more

Telemarketing and Interruptions

Posted on January 7th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Telemarketers are one of the annoyances we all live with, and contribute their part to the overall flow of interruptions that it damaging our ability to concentrate on what we want to do. I find it interesting that these days, at any rate here in Israel, these rascals are following in the footsteps of our work-related information overload into the evening hours. Today I got two calls in my evening – one from a  car rental company stating its desire to improve its service to me (actually, they simply wanted to verify my contact information) and one from a health.. Read more

And now, Undersea Cellphone Interruptions

Posted on January 2nd, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

We’ve heard how man-made noise pollution from ship propellers and sonar disturbs the lives of whales and damages their famous whale song communications. It seems that underwater distractions and interruptions are now destined to affect humans as well… I saw this while flipping pages in the ubiquitous SkyMall magazine on a plane: an ad for a NEW! Underwater cellular phone system. It leads with the question “Have you ever wanted to make or receive a phone call underwater?” Why, of course! Happens to all of us, all the time! What the ad  doesn’t ask, perhaps because it assumes this is.. Read more

SMS in Banking: no, thank you!

Posted on December 21st, 2009 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was talking to a friendly young lady on my bank’s telephone access line (a very convenient service, that). After she handled the transaction I needed, she told me in a cheerful voice that I’m entitled to the bank’s new SMS service, which she proceeded to describe. This great new service would enable me to receive SMS messages right to my mobile phone whenever anything happened in my account: credits, debits, credit card transactions, and so on. Each would blare an alert on my belt. That, I was told, would save me a lot of effort checking what was going.. 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

Information Overload and Haute Cuisine

Posted on November 27th, 2009 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

We tend to think of Information Overload in a knowledge work context – business offices, hi-tech, and the like. But my friend Rich Poliak was in the restaurant business for a while, and he gave me a fascinating glimpse of the situation between the kitchen and the dining hall. It turns out that everyone in his restaurant – the Chef, the line cooks, the servers and he himself – were often checking messages, texting and posting on Facebook, Twitter, etc. He attempted to place a policy of no cellphone use during work hours except for breaks, but it was difficult.. Read more

Mobile phones and parenting

Posted on November 22nd, 2009 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

The impact of handheld devices on our social lives is visible enough; we all see people stop in the middle of a conversation to answer a ringing mobile phone. We’re even becoming used to it, willing to forgive this rather rude behavior. But there is one category of such interruptions where the rudeness is inexcusable, and that is where the affected party isn’t a “consenting adult”: we also interrupt our interaction with our children. The Wall Street Journal carried a wonderful article titled “Blackberry orphans” a few years ago that discussed in some detail how the toll on parental attention.. Read more

The risk of doing mail in a meeting

Posted on October 30th, 2009 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Everybody “does mail” in meetings. These days it’s email, and earlier it was snail mail; whether the attendees sit with a glassy stare fixed on their notebook screens or they shuffle piles of paper, the impact on the meeting’s effectiveness is obviously negative. This is hardly new behavior… as a hilarious anecdote from ancient Rome illustrates. This is a true story, documented by Plutarch. The attendee in question is none less than Julius Caesar himself, who was standing in front of the Roman senate, engaged in a debate with his arch-opponent Cato (the younger). Someone came in and delivered a.. Read more

Making the case against Information Overload: a resource compilation

Posted on October 20th, 2009 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Solving Information Overload in an enterprise is difficult enough; but before you ever get there, you need to convince management that they want to solve it. This would seem a no-brainer: managers are the worst hit when it comes to excessive email, so you’d think they’d jump at a proposal to solve the problem; and some, indeed, do. Many, however, fail to realize just how high the price is that their organization pays for the flood of messaging; and when I was working for Intel, whose culture asserts  that Data rules supreme, I had to bring data substantiating that price… Read more