Archive for the 'Individual Solutions' Category

How to Avoid Forwarding Gaffes With Email

Posted on May 21st, 2015 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Gaffes in communication are common in all media, and email is no exception. It does, however, enable special opportunities to be very sorry for what you said… The problem with Forward The main reason is that an email, once sent, is no longer yours . You must assume – and to your detriment often forget to assume – that it will get forwarded and re-forwarded. Everything you said to your intended recipient will likely as not be placed before numerous other people. It is astounding how thoughtlessly a recipient can set loose a message meant for their eyes only! The.. Read more

Call to Action: We Need a Benchmark of Email Classifier Performance!

Posted on December 10th, 2014 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

A vibrant menagerie of email classifiers If you look through  my Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions you will see an entire chapter dedicated to automation of incoming email classification – that is, software solutions that classify incoming messages by a variety of attributes to achieve two main goals: prioritize messages that are important to the recipient over those who are not, and aggregate messages into groups of a common nature. These solutions form a collection which is a wonder to behold. They define the outcome of message classification from a great many angles, including: Prioritizing messages by the assessed.. Read more

Nathan’s Favorite Solutions to Information Overload

Posted on August 14th, 2014 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

When I consult about Information Overload, I often get asked what are my favorite solutions to this problem. Of course this is a simplistic approach: what works in one company won’t necessarily be a good fit to another, as it all depends on the local culture and other factors. Still, the question is raised, so with the above caveat I will try to answer it. Now that I’ve published the Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions (available in PDF and Kindle versions), I have a long list to choose from: 164 solutions are included in the guide, and a few.. Read more

Taking Proactive Action Against Information Overload

Posted on June 25th, 2014 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Two messages So, just after I wrote the post  Oh, the Horror: What if You Miss an Important Message?! I get two message in my Inbox. One is from MailChimp, and informs me that a subscriber has unsubscribed from my monthly newsletter. This happens from time to time; I’m sorry to lose a reader, but for every one that leaves a couple of others join the list, so I accept that it’s just a part of life and move on. This time, however, was different: there was the second message. This was titled “Information overload – why I unsubscribed”, and.. Read more

Solving Information Overload: Technology Assisted Behavior Change

Posted on March 19th, 2014 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

An interesting hybrid If you scan the Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions you will see two prominent classes of solutions: Behaviour change solutions and Technology based solutions. The former class contains a variety of methods for making people change the way they communicate so they become more effective, and help their coworkers do the same. You want people to send less mail, compose it more skillfully, process it more judiciously, avoid interrupting others and themselves (a sizable part of the interruptions people undergo are self-induced!), and so on. These solutions may involve training, educating, and informing people through multiple.. Read more

Announcing the Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions!

Posted on March 5th, 2014 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

I’ve done it! I’m proud to announce the publication and availability of Solutions to Information Overload: The Definitive Guide, my first e-Book. Check it out at https://www.nathanzeldes.com/guide, or read on to find out more about it. How the Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions came to be Twenty years ago, when I discovered Email Overload as an incipient problem at Intel, there were almost no solutions available to me, so I had to develop my own. In the next decade the problem’s global impact grew, and solutions started appearing, some as commercial products and some as homegrown programs and strategies.. Read more

The two Faces of Anytime, Anywhere

Posted on February 14th, 2014 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

A cool idea (or so we thought) … It really did sound like a great concept at the time: Work Anytime, Anywhere! Catchy slogans like that always sound good, like Andy Grove’s prediction in the nineties of “Free MIPS, Free Bauds” (which is pretty close to reality by now). And the concept of being able to do your work from anywhere as if you were in the office, and at any time of your choosing rather than 9-to-5, seemed particularly cool – so liberating and exhilarating! We in IT were certainly delivering the capability. Admittedly secure remote access was a.. Read more

Coming Next: the Definitive Guide to Information Overload Solutions!

Posted on February 10th, 2014 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Whew! Finished at last!… As I mentioned in a post a few months ago, I’ve been hard at work writing an encyclopedic compilation of every solution I know to Information Overload, from software to training tools, from behavior change drives to personal strategies, from commercial products to innovative ideas. This seemed to be a never ending task, with new solutions popping up all the time; I finally had to recall that wonderful adage, “In every project comes the moment to shoot the engineers and move into production”! So, I arbitrarily closed the list and found that I have 164 solutions.. Read more

How Software Failed to Replace our Secretaries – and how it’s Getting Better

Posted on December 4th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

Check out my guest post on the Doodle blog: Everything but the coffee: The evolution of the automated secretary. In this post I discuss the hopes, back in the nineties, that MS Outlook and other Office tools could make the trusty secretaries of old redundant (you could type your own letters and set your own meetings, right?), and how we found before long that a an 80386 microprocessor with some 300,000 transistors was no match for a human with 100 billion neurons. I then discuss the case of setting meetings, and why Outlook in itself is incapable of doing it.. Read more

Finally! a Big Button to End Workday Interruptions!

Posted on October 7th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

A much needed button The need is hardly new. If you’re like every knowledge worker on the planet, you’ve been suffering for years from the incessant inflow of interruptions (one every three minutes on average, research shows) that chop your workday into tiny fragments. The outcome is “Continuous Partial Attention”, and the cost to productivity has been described in detail in my series of insight articles about the effects of information overload. Closing your office door won’t solve this problem. First, because many offices don’t have doors in this day and age – and if they had, there’d still be.. Read more