Blog. Insight, issues, opinions and productivity solutions

Go home to your children!

Posted on March 1, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

One affliction of the modern knowledge worker is that people don’t see their children: first, because they work late in the office; and then, because they spend their hours in the home clearing their email. I was pleased to read in today’s morning paper, then, that the Israeli civil service is going to adopt policies that will mitigate at least part of this issue. A report whose recommendations were approved by the cabinet will make government employ more parenting-friendly. There will be  summer camps for employees’ kids, there will be a  move to output-based employee assessment (rather than time based),.. Read more

Do not disturb! Doctors’ visit in progress!

Posted on February 22, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the  ward – the.. Read more

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Posted on February 15, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years. More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms. I’ve.. Read more

Zero benefit email – come and get it!

Posted on February 10, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I received a letter (yes, on paper) from Audible.com. I am a happy customer of their audio book service; I pay a fixed modest sum monthly, and receive one “credit” each month, which embodies the right to download one book into my iPod. Their letter tried to sell me on the idea of getting onto their “Email Network”. In other words, grant them permission to send me promotional emails. I can’t complain – they were kind (and law abiding) enough to ask my permission, after all. But I read the letter and was struck by one of the “benefits” they.. Read more

Slower or faster? Email vs. Voice

Posted on February 4, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

When I was a ham radio operator, I could communicate with far away hobbyists using either Voice transmission or Morse Code. You’d think Voice would be the faster means of conversation; after all, the spoken word is faster than the dots and dashes of even the fastest telegraph operator. And yet both modes had their charm – and both took about the same time, because with Morse, we’d use abbreviations and keep the conversation focused and terse in a way not necessary with the luxury of voice. Thus, the question of which mode is faster was far from settled… The.. Read more

An overlooked, sure-fire way to regain work time

Posted on January 29, 2011 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

I was talking to a client who – like most of us – needed more hours in the day, and he complained that part of the problem was that he was required to generate long reports, and it took him hours and hours just to type them in. So I asked him, how does he type? Turns out he uses two fingers to peck at the keyboard. I asked him, why not ten? Why doesn’t he touch type? Of course he couldn’t touch type, nor was he planning to learn to; and neither do almost all the knowledge workers I.. Read more

Join us at IORG!

Posted on January 18, 2011 · Posted in Uncategorized

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is looking to expand its membership, and if you are an Information Overload practitioner or researcher I heartily encourage you to join our ranks. IORG started off in 2007 as an informal “Infomania Workshop” of some two dozen interested people, and this evolved into an official non-profit interest group that had launched in a face to face conference in NYC in mid-2008. This group comprises academics, industry people, consultants, analysts and others – people from diverse backgrounds that share a common passion to understand and help mitigate the information overload problem that is threatening.. Read more

Facebook: a third factor in enterprise Information Overload?

Posted on January 13, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Information Overload can have manifold manifestations: physicians have more new articles coming out in their field than they can possibly cover, consumers have too many TV channels to choose from comfortably, journalists have a hard time staying on top of breaking news, and so forth. But in the enterprise, the domain of the knowledge worker population I belong to and serve, Information Overload took a fairly predictable and well-characterized form, and it had two underlying components: Email Overload and Interruptions (a.k.a. distractions). Until recently, this was it; find a way to handle the hundred or (many) more incoming emails a.. Read more

The ease of getting connected

Posted on January 6, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Welcome to a new decade, promising ever more technological change! Here is one change that came to my mind: I remember, as anyone of my generation does, how you used to have to wait more than a year to have a phone line delivered by the state-run phone monopoly of the time. In fact, after I got married in the mid-seventies and waited a couple of years, I got a shared line with my absent-minded neighbor, who would forget to hang up after conversing… This is now a fading memory; these days, we take it for granted that we can.. Read more

This computer is no friend of mine…

Posted on December 28, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Recently I had occasion to observe a medical expert, a senior professor at a major hospital, as he tried to access a patient’s medical information on the hospital’s computer network. This took a while, and he turned to me and said “As you can see, this computer is no friend of mine”. He then added, apologetically, “Now, if only my grandson were here, he could do this in no time”. Obviously the doctor was of the pre-computer generation, and many would dismiss his difficulty as a natural result of his age. But as I thought it over, it occurred to.. Read more