Posts Tagged 'email'

The Warm Fuzzy factor in communications

Posted on August 12th, 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

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

Posted on July 8th, 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

Facebook and Email Overload reduction

Posted on June 28th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Of course Facebook can do a lot of different things for different people; and different people eye it with enthusiasm, hostility, and anything in between. Some say it can consume hours each day, and thus reduce your productivity; others say it will eventually replace email in the workplace (as it is already in process of doing in the world of Gen Y and those who want to communicate with them). We’ll see in the interesting next few years… For my part, I find Facebook a pleasant way to keep in touch – lightly – with my friends. My personal strategy.. Read more

How to avoid email mania without annoying your customers

Posted on June 18th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Here is a question I was asked by an attendee at one of my lectures. I was teaching the importance of not using email like Instant Messenger, of reading it only a few times a day in preset slots. The guy wanted to know how can he do this, when his customers expect him to respond instantly? Won’t they be annoyed (to use a mild term)? He would prefer to suffer than to upset his customers! He certainly had a point. In my experience if you cut your email reading just like that, cold turkey, some of your correspondents will.. Read more

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

Online Silence and Trust

Posted on May 8th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I lectured at the Info 2010 conference this week, where we had a special track dedicated to Information Overload, with many excellent speakers. One of these was Dr. Yoram Kalman, a key contributor to IORG and a long time friend, who presented his research into Online Silence. This is the phenomenon, so familiar to us all, where you send an email to a person and no reply comes back. After a few days you get restless and resend; often this will remain of no avail. Then you phone the recipient, and perhaps leave a message urging they look for your.. Read more

Correspondence of yesteryear

Posted on April 27th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”. Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp.. Read more

Altruism and Email Overload solutions

Posted on April 4th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

While checking online for tidbits on Email Overload, I bumped into an article in The Advocate titled Managing E-mail Overload: Reducing Volume by Being Mindful of Others, written by Stephen M. Nipper. It shares a variety of useful tips, but its main emphasis, as the name implies, is on considering the impact of the mail one sends on others, and practicing restraint by avoiding Reply to All, writing concise messages, etc. Which makes perfect sense: if we send less mail, and it is easier to read, surely that will reduce email overload to everyone’s benefit. But it isn’t so simple… 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

Does anyone notice the red “Importance” icon in Outlook?

Posted on March 7th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Much of Email is about attention. The sender of an email wants to secure the attention of the recipient long enough for them to read and understand the message; the recipient, usually inundated with mail, may be unwilling or unable to react to every message in their Inbox. Thus, it is up to the sender to grab a chunk of the recipient’s limited stock of attention. In particular, if a message is truly important, the sender wants the recipient to realize this. Outlook offers a way to mark the importance of a message, by setting its importance to High. This.. Read more