Blog. Insight, issues, opinions and productivity solutions

Made my day!

Posted on May 22, 2011 · Posted in Individual Solutions

My lectures on Information Overload invariably elicit an applause, which is gratifying but leaves open the question: what is the real impact on attendees in the long term? With long-term organizational interventions, we can collect data; but a lecture is a one-time encounter! I was therefore pleased when I gave a lecture at a venue I revisit every few weeks, and a technician who was there to support the IT stuff came to me and said he’s heard me the previous month and had taken my advice to heart. He’d taken stock of his communication habits, gotten off lists, created.. Read more

Email Overload and Organizational structure

Posted on May 16, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was discussing email overload with two VPs in a hi-tech company, and one of them   shared the observation that he had been suffering from heavy email loads until an auspicious event happened: he had appointed a more junior person to manage part of his activity, and the overload disappeared. Of course one hopes he had good cause to appoint the subordinate to the role, other than to ease his own Inbox nightmare; but even so, it is interesting to consider what has been talking place here. There can be a number of mechanisms at play: The VP had been.. Read more

A sad vignette of family life in the email era

Posted on May 5, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today: One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed: I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time. A lovely domestic  tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload. By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once.. Read more

Ask your users!

Posted on April 30, 2011 · Posted in Off-topic

Today I was writing my monthly Newsletter (this always seems to slide to the last day of the month 😉 ) and as I was re-reading it – I always do, aware of Murphy lurking in the shadows – I noted this passage, relating to choosing a video conferencing system: Talk to your IT people about your options; but remember that the key thing is user perception and willingness. You may want to raise the subject in a group or staff meeting, and identify what the best usage model would be in the context of their collaboration needs. Then work.. Read more

Royalty, too, has Information Overload!

Posted on April 23, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

In the film Her majesty Mrs. Brown, we see a grieving Queen Victoria refusing to return to her duties in the years following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. The film has much else to recommend it, but as an Information Overload practitioner I couldn’t help but enjoy the moment when the Queen – played by Dame Judi Dench – angrily exclaims “my ministers send me letters to read – boxes and boxes of letters!“ This was before email, before Facebook, before our BlackBerry-distracted modern existence; and yet even then Management involved Information Overload – and even then, senior.. Read more

The price of extreme mobility

Posted on April 16, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages. This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of.. Read more

What comes first – email or a phone call?

Posted on April 7, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was giving a workshop on Information Overload and an attendee   proposed that email is more effective when you precede it with a phone call. His thinking was this: if you first discuss the matter at hand on the phone, and only then send an email to confirm or flesh out details, then there will be no lack of clarity because both parties are aligned. This means less back-and-forth emails to seek clarification or correct misunderstandings. Now, this actually makes a lot of sense, and in fact I use this system when I need to broach a subject or a.. Read more

Our evolving attention span

Posted on March 25, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

One obvious aspect of this hectic day and age is that people’s attention span is much shorter than it used to be. As has been pointed out before, almost nobody reads books the length of War and Peace anymore… With all the media around us moving to shorter and shorter sound bytes and communication  happening in SMS messages and tweets, it would be natural to speculate that the cause of the shortening attention span is the influence – one can even say manipulation – of all these media. And yet it seems to go beyond a simple reaction; because there.. Read more

The one-page principle

Posted on March 18, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

There is a quote attributed to Mark Ardis:  “A specification [or a design, a procedure, a test plan] that will not fit on one page of 8.5-by-11 inch paper cannot be understood“. This is called “The one-page principle”. Other than being a snappy quote, this is something to consider seriously. A significant aspect of the email overload people suffer is carried in the attachments; indeed, my first inkling that email was becoming a problem, back around 1994, was when a senior manager in my workplace had declared that he refuses to read any email that has any attachments at all… Read more

Does Local Culture impact email style?

Posted on March 10, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I was lecturing on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and when I got to the part about “write succinct, terse, clear mails” an attendee raised his hand to ask me, how would that be perceived by recipients in the United Kingdom? Turns out that they had a workshop on global cultural gaps and it included the notion that the British like to start with small talk and only get to the point later; so they ought to find very short emails rude! Good point, that. Having also worked in a global corporation, I am very much aware of the.. Read more