Blog. Insight, issues, opinions and productivity solutions

Do What I Mean: Is DWIM a Blessing or a Curse?

Posted on August 19, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Remember Alta Vista? I do; I’ve been a search engine junkie from day one, back in the mid-nineties when the explosion of web servers made these miraculous tools indispensable. At the time I was driving Intel’s adoption of the Web, and was teaching a “Searching the Internet” course I’d developed; I believed that proper searching know-how will become a critical skill in the years ahead. I was right with that prediction, of course, but I hadn’t foreseen one development: my course had put emphasis on Boolean search syntax and the related mindset; and these have slowly been driven out by.. Read more

How You Can Stop the Abuse of Reply to All

Posted on August 14, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Reply to All: probably the most hated feature of Email. How do I know? Because whenever I work with clients to reduce Email Overload, one request pops up right at the beginning: Can we put a stop to the abuse of Reply All? Yes, you can. But before I talk about solutions, let’s consider why anyone would misuse Reply to All in the first place, if they hate it so? Part of the problem, and the reason the feature is retained, is that it is really about enabling two very different functions: Conversation: When communicating within  a small team, it.. Read more

Ubiquity

Posted on August 2, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was at an event where graduating college students were presenting their projects. One student was showing a software system that allows you to use a Smartphone – with its motion sensors – as a 3D controller for a video game. On one slide he compared his tool to a Wii setup, and under “Cost” he pointed out that a Wii system costs a couple hundred bucks and the software he was presenting would cost under $5. I couldn’t resist pointing out that for his system you needed to also have a smartphone, which would cost more than the Wii;.. Read more

IORG announces Info Overload Resource Center!

Posted on July 25, 2012 · Posted in Uncategorized

The Information Overload Research Group has released today its Information Overload Resource Center. This is a crowd-sourced repository of articles and research related to Information Overload which is available at http://informationoverloadresources.com. You are invited help us build up this repository of IO links.  Go to the above URL, register and submit your share to this communal work in progress! We need links to articles and resources about Information Overload and related issues such as interruptions, multitasking, attention management, and similar information management challenges. We were guided by three principles in creating the resource center: Anyone may contribute pointers to relevant.. Read more

A laudable approach to paring distributions

Posted on July 22, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

I recently received a message from a manager in a hi-tech corporation who had applied a technique I’ve never seen before to the matter of removing unnecessary people from dist lists. The context is that I was corresponding with his boss, who delegated to my current sender; and the latter decided to drop the boss from the continuing exchange, removing him from the addressee list. So far so good, rare but not unheard of. The twist was that at the start of the email this guy had put in the line (Removing Joe from the thread) Not only had he.. Read more

Organizational altruism

Posted on June 23, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Following a lecture on information overload my audience – a management forum in a midsized company – was discussing in small breakout groups norms for improving their messaging effectiveness. When the conclusions were read to the entire forum, we had many of the usual useful suggestions, but one team had a truly unusual contribution. They proposed that when one receives an email with a question that is best answered by someone else in the company, one should not forward it to the appropriate recipient right away. That is, say I’m the expert on left-threaded widgets and I get a mail.. Read more

The early bird and information overload

Posted on June 5, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Over the years I noticed a solution that some diligent people apply to get over info overload and interruptions: they start their workday (at home or even in the office) an hour or more before the usual “Nine to Five”. Showing up at the office at 6 or 7 AM gives them an hour or two of total quiet, when they can concentrate on their work. In a sense they sacrifice sleep time to get onto a time machine and jump to that gentler age when people actually worked, without the rude interruptions of our Blackberry era. It’s a satisfying.. Read more

An early observation on multitasking

Posted on May 25, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

While browsing a forgotten bookshelf I found myself leafing through an old volume called “The scientist in action – a scientific study of his methods”, by one William H. George, a Physics professor from Sheffield. This book had been published in 1938 by Emerson Books, NY. And as I flipped the pages I happened to notice the following statement: It is one of the properties of man that if he tries to give attention to many things at once he becomes confused. Confusion of thought is a hindrance to scientific research… I have no idea who Mr. George was, but.. Read more

How to make programmers efficient

Posted on May 6, 2012 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

I was talking to a manager of IT systems in a financial organization, and she told me of an impressive step she’d taken to improve effectiveness. She had a group of programmers working for her, and they were suffering – as do we all – from frequent interruptions. So she removed the (landline) telephones from their rooms! She also made it known that these people were not to be interrupted by other means, and thereby allowed them to do what they were there for – write code. The results were very evident: efficiency in this team had visibly improved relative.. Read more

Is email going away?

Posted on April 23, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Every now and then someone proclaims that email has outlived its usefulness (some, groaning under their Inboxes, might say outstayed its welcome), and is on the way out. How about it? It might seem that these pronouncements of doom for the world’s most widely used messaging channel have some basis. After all, the young generation – Generation Y – really prefer to conduct much of their communication via Facebook; it is said that some universities don’t bother to assign email accounts to their students because they don’t need them anymore. And even in the enterprise, we have that startling declaration.. Read more