Archive for the 'Individual Solutions' Category

All Right! Email is Finally Adapting to the New Millennium!

Posted on August 14th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Email solutions for the era of Information Overload These days I’m hard at work on a major effort: I’m writing a white paper I call “Solutions to Information Overload: a Catalogue Raisonné”. It will be 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. And the more solutions I include, the more I find – there will likely be over 150 of them! While many of the solutions I include have been around for a decade or more, I am.. Read more

BrainYno: the Ultimate Solution to Information Overload?

Posted on June 5th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The holy grail of Information Overload solutions Interruptions are a major component of Information Overload (indeed, they cause more harm than the rightly reviled second component, email overload, as I’d shown here). However, we’ve known for years that not all interruptions are created equal: the damage depends on the context. An unrelated phone call while you’re taking an exam certainly does more harm than one when you’re slouching in front of the TV. Microsoft Research had developed a wonderful application some years ago called Priorities, which looks at every aspect of a knowledge worker’s attentional context to determine whether to.. Read more

Enounce MySpeed: a Highly Recommended Time Saving Tool

Posted on May 15th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The problem with video I am ambivalent about video instruction. On one hand, it adds a richness unavailable by other channels. On the other, it takes time to view – and, unless I need to learn how to perform emergency brain surgery, a written paragraph is faster to read by myself than watching a talking head read it to me. With text, you can skim and jump around – it’s a Random Access medium; video is inherently serial and limited by the average person’s verbal speed. With time an increasingly precious resource in our hectic age of information overload, wasting.. Read more

The Legitimacy – or Otherwise – of Ultra-brief Emails

Posted on April 18th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

A devious solution to email overload A friend pointed me to a post  that offered a simple and highly unusual solution to email overload: change the signature block on your desktop email client to read “Sent from my iPhone”. The idea, the writer explained, is that this will make you “feel more comfortable offering short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails, thus improving your email productivity and freeing up time to do other more important work”. This is certainly devious, is probably effective, and the logic seems unassailable… but it raises a question: why would you need it? Surely.. Read more

How to Secure the Isolation You Need to Be Effective

Posted on April 10th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

The acclaimed American novelist Jonathan Franzen has an unusual way of ensuring he can concentrate and be creative. To quote the NY Times: Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a Spartan studio … behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen … wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold. Kudos to the Franzen for being a touch typist, but here I want to focus on his statement: “It’s very, very hard to concentrate. You have to hold your mind free of all the clichés”… Read more

Radical Email Overload Solution: Batching Email Delivery

Posted on February 19th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

One of the worst causes of information overload is the constant arrival of email into the knowledge worker’s attention sphere. With new mail arriving every few minutes, people can never fully focus on their work. If they haven’t turned off the “you’ve got mail” alerts they are passively distracted; if they have, a sizable fraction of users still distract themselves by checking for new email every few minutes. What is needed is a way to prevent this checking. A radical email overload solution concept Over my years of helping companies fight information overload I’ve devised my share of original solutions;.. Read more

Reduce Information Overload Using Brilliant Email Etiquette

Posted on January 10th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Guest Post by Dr Monica Seeley Information overload and its sibling email overload continue to plague most business users.  Indeed although the latest figures for sick leave have been falling, the incidences of stress related illness have risen. Information overload and email overload are major contributors to stress related illness.   Our brains just cannot cope with the volume of information being  pushed at us, through email and now social technologies.  It has been suggested that we are now bombarded through these channels with the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day! In the case of email, a major problem is actually.. Read more

Why Disk Cleanup Matters, and How You Can Get It Done

Posted on January 4th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

I suppose it’s because I’m a geek at heart, but I’m fascinated by the concept of disk cleanup… Why Disk Cleanup capability is important for you By Disk Cleanup I mean deleting unnecessary files  from the Hard Disk on your own PC. Unnecessary can mean many things – obsolete system files, temporary files, corrupted files… but more importantly, user files, files you’ve saved to your disk in the past and no longer need. This may be because you have newer versions of them, or because you have duplicates of the same version in different folders, or because they’re safely stored.. Read more

How YOU Can Achieve Work/Life Balance in the Face of Information Overload

Posted on December 18th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Work/Life Balance and Email: an irreconcilable contradiction? We all know the facts (if you don’t, check out my articles). Your typical knowledge worker receives 50 – 300 email messages daily of which 30% are useless, and spends some 20 hours a week dealing with them (The Israel Internet Association passed out a survey before my lecture there the other day, and the results affirm these facts once again). These numbers mean that people are trying to overcome their overflowing Inbox around the clock, including evenings, nights, weekends and vacations. Any pretense at Work/Life Balance has disappeared with the arrival of.. Read more

How You Can Deploy “Quiet Time” to Increase Your Group’s Productivity

Posted on December 13th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

When I speak to knowledge workers about solving information overload, I mention some fairly hi-tech solutions: software products that prevent, reduce or help combat the infoglut they all struggle with. And while those are useful, some of the most effective solutions are entirely lo-tech. I already wrote here about No Email Day; let me now tell you about the solution called Quiet Time. How to disconnect and (maybe) win a Nobel prize As everyone knows, William Shockley won a Nobel Prize  as one of the team that invented the Point Contact Transistor at Bell Labs. As many don’t know, he.. Read more