Blog. Insight, issues, opinions and productivity solutions

Speed vs. Thought in email communications

Posted on August 23, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Given that knowledge workers receive many more emails daily than they can possibly process, it is small wonder that some emails never get a response (the phenomenon called Online Silence, which I’ve discussed before). Indeed, the research shows that if a message isn’t replied to in a day or so, it is likely never to be answered. There is, however, an interesting exception: messages that require an answer but also necessitate thought. A great example are requests for LinkedIn endorsements (also known as recommendations). The way it works, in my experience, is this: Jack asks his LinkedIn contact, Jill, to.. Read more

Six ways your email can reach the wrong eyes

Posted on August 18, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

One mistake people often make is assuming the emails they send are private. All hell can break lose when an email is disclosed to unintended parties. There are many ways this can happen to a message (and Murphy’s laws will ensure it does, at the worst possible time). For instance: The recipient might forward it inappropriately. This is probably the most common occurrence. Sometimes it’s an act of pure idiocy, as when you send someone a personal comment about X and before you know it they send it to X or his colleagues. But often it’s indirect: the recipient forwards.. Read more

The Warm Fuzzy factor in communications

Posted on August 12, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

These days I make a living helping people avoid spending all night on processing their email overload, so it was with some amusement that I remembered how I used to spend my own nights communicating with people – but enjoying every minute of it! This was back when I was in my teens and twenties, and I had a ham radio station I’d built myself (of course). I’d stay up late at night (when shortwave reception tends to improve) trying to connect to as many other radio amateurs in distant lands as I could raise in my earphones. It was.. Read more

The demise of Google Wave

Posted on August 8, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

When Google announced Wave, that innovative Email / IM / Collaboration product, I’d found it very exciting. I was happy to see in it many concepts I’ve been awaiting for a long time, notably a very nicely done “threaded inbox” paradigm. Still, after playing with it a little I began to refer to it in my lectures on Information Overload as “The jury is still out on whether this will reduce the overload or increase it”. Well, the jury is back. A year later, Google announces it will phase out Wave. It just didn’t catch… It’s tempting to claim it.. Read more

The Dawn of the Blackberry Era

Posted on August 3, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Today RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is even more chock-full of amazing technology than the model before it, which was itself ahead of its predecessor, which was… This has been going on for a long time, but it reminds me that the sequence did have a beginning – yes, there was a first BlackBerry, which had perhaps appeared, fully formed, from the primordial chaos… I collect items from the History of Computing, and I have a sample of that earliest BlackBerry, the model 950, introduced in 1998, which you see in this photo. The interesting thing is that.. Read more

The curse of being in the know

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

The desire to “Be in the Know” has no doubt been around since our stone age ancestors had developed language. In addition to the actual value of the information, it meant being close to the seat of power, to where the decisions of the tribe or village or city-state were being made or influenced. It was a heady feeling and a powerful practical tool in social interactions; it could even be a survival skill. Unfortunately, this desire to share in the flow of information has taken a nasty turn when Information Overload came around. It used to be that in.. Read more

A blast from the past: weekly status updates

Posted on July 22, 2010 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Periodic status reports are one area where you would do well to look for information overload improvement opportunities. In many organizations the network hums with daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports, often with large amounts of redundancy. Just take a critical look around you, or in the mirror… But something reminded me the other day of an extreme example of such redundancy, going back to 1982. I had just joined Intel and relocated to Silicon Valley for some on-the-job training, and among the many wonders of the American Way I was introduced to a wonderful method of sharing status.. Read more

Facebook encroaches on email and blog interaction

Posted on July 18, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I observed in my April newsletter that we may be approaching an inflection point: the next generation of workers may not be as eager as their predecessors to “Live in their Email” – they may well choose to live in Facebook, or some equivalent, instead. Some of the younger generation already forgo using email today: they want to talk to their social circle, and doing so in Facebook, where they do indeed live, comes naturally. Whether this will also happen (at least in part) in the workplace is still unknown, but it’s worth considering – is being considered, I’ve seen,.. Read more

The napping crusade

Posted on July 13, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

I had the pleasure of being interviewed for an article on Multitasking by Thea O’Connor, an Australian journalist and health promotion consultant. Of course I visited her web site and I discovered a refreshingly different campaign Thea is crusading for: the Napping Project. The idea being, that “napping is a refreshing and proven solution to tiredness in a time-poor world” – and thus, her intent is to establish the mini-siesta as a socially acceptable and valued practice in our personal and working lives. At first glance sleeping on the job sounded weird, but then I realized that unless you’re a.. Read more

Brevity is the soul of Wit… so where is the soul of Email?

Posted on July 8, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

If Brevity is the soul of Wit (as Shakespeake has Polonius tell us), how much of this soul can we expect in the age of electronic communication? Not much, probably. Brevity requires more investment than verbosity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Since in today’s overloaded work culture nobody has any time for anything, the tendency is to make emails longer than necessary, to the detriment of the hapless recipient. There are three places where you see a combination of brevity and.. Read more