Archive for the 'Individual Solutions' Category

Reading email or Understanding email?

Posted on June 12th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms, Individual Solutions

Considering the amount of time we all spend reading incoming email, it’s amazing how little we understand what we read. That reading and understanding are two different things is clear; this is why legal documents use verbiage like “I confirm that I have read and understood the terms & conditions bla bla bla”… but it’s amazing how easy it is to read a mail message and totally miss large chunks of it. People glance at the message, form an impression of what it means to them, and move on – after all, they may have 100 others waiting to be.. Read more

Do not Disturb!

Posted on May 30th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

My Nokia E71 smartphone has a selection of available specialized profiles, of which the most useful one is probably “Silent”, for use in meetings and theatres. Useful, yet I use it with trepidation. I fear the Silent profile because I KNOW, I’m practically certain, that I will forget to turn it off when the meeting is over, only to discover later an accumulation of “missed calls”. The obvious solution, which seems to elude the good designers at Nokia (and at the makers of every other Smartphone I’ve used to date), is to implement a profile of “silent for one hour”,.. Read more

Nathan’s First Tip for fighting email overload

Posted on March 17th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

To completely stop email overload, you need to tailor a complete organizational solution; you can get some ideas for that on my site. But I find that many people derive value by implementing some simple individual measures, and I often get asked what the best of these are. So here, for your enjoyment, is my favorite first tip, the one you should take if you were to take one tip  only to the proverbial desert island (assuming they had WiFi on the island): Only check your email in preset time slots each day. This seemingly obvious idea is actually powerful.. Read more

Five ways to prevent gaffes in email

Posted on February 8th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The horror stories abound. A careless click on Send, and incalculable damage befalls a sensitive business deal or workplace relationship. Or the sender can become a joke. Or worse. This is not new; even before email, a careless letter could do much damage if it fell into the wrong hands, or was written in haste. I still keep a mimeographed letter sent by the HR manager of a company to all its employees, where his typist dropped a single letter in the phrase “To: all employees”. Unfortunately for him, this was in Hebrew, and the accidentally misspelled phrase read “To:.. Read more

Stop hoarding information for a rainy day

Posted on December 29th, 2009 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Here’s a story from the early nineties, a time when much information in the workplace was stored and moved on sheets of mashed tree pulp. Back then I was doing research into Artificial Neural Networks, and my coworkers at Intel got into the habit of mailing me (in an inter-office envelope) a copy of any article on the subject that they came across. And I got into the habit of piling the articles at the corner of my desk, so that I might read them one day when I had the time. After all, they were articles in my field.. Read more

Screening after-hours interruptions

Posted on December 17th, 2009 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Today’s knowledge workers are normally assumed to be working on company business well after they went home for the night; they are always reachable by cellphone and email. Of course they could turn off their devices when they exit the office, but most are afraid to do so in case of a real emergency, which in our global economy can come at any hour and demand their attention. What can they do? I was heartened to hear an original solution from a woman who juggles the tasks of managing a group in a high tech company, raising two kids, and.. Read more