Posts Tagged 'handheld'

Our Shrinking Attention Span and What to Do About It

Posted on November 28th, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Photo by Daniel Cañibano on Unsplash Recently I gave my History of Computing lecture to a group of hi-tech employees. After I’d finished, an engineer came to me and complimented me in an unexpected way. “These days”, he said,  “I have a three minute attention span. After three minutes of listening to anything out comes my smartphone… but in your lecture I put it right back in my pocket!” It is pleasant to hear this kind of feedback, but as an information overload expert it set my mind thinking about the first part of his comment. The part about the.. Read more

Driving like a millennial

Posted on July 26th, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

An uncanny driving experience I’ve been driving in California for decades. As an Intel engineer I spent two years on relocation in Silicon Valley, and then flew in a few times a year for over 20 years. But last month I was in Santa Clara and decided to visit a friend who had moved to the central valley, an area I’ve never visited before, some 4 hours’ drive south-east of the San Jose. And unlike all my previous visits to the golden state, this time I used Waze. It worked beautifully, as always, without any need to adjust anything to.. Read more

How to Respond to a Ringing Phone in a Meeting

Posted on May 31st, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once talked to a manager who shared this story: she’d been interviewing a young hiring candidate when his phone went off. He answered it, and it was his wife who wanted to wish him success at the interview. She told me she’d felt it was immature of him to pick up the call, though luckily for him she did not hold this against him when she made her decision. But this story made me think: did the young man do anything wrong? Or was it the right thing to do? Pros: By answering the call, he was showing respect.. Read more

Should You Buy a Smartphone for Your Child?

Posted on February 6th, 2016 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Should you? Not without first understanding the implications. This question derives from a real life situation, which happens a lot: a kid approaches a parent asking for a smartphone. Please? Pretty please?? All the other kids have them! I’ve heard of six year olds popping the request, and parents in our society of abundance are all too likely to give in. But a smartphone is not a toy; it is a supercharged technology powerhouse, with incredible potential for both good and evil. It’s not exactly like giving a loaded gun to a kid, but it merits some serious thought. After.. Read more

Unplugged Weddings: People are Pushing Back!

Posted on January 27th, 2015 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

At last: some pushback The “democratization” of photography in the smartphone age has wrested the role of the professional wedding photographer and distributed it among all the invited friends and family members; and this change happened almost overnight, in line with the exponential speedup of technology introduction in recent years. The relevance of this to information overload was the subject of my recent post, Wedding Photos and Managing Information Overload. Another interesting development, which came surprisingly close on the heels of the former, is the appearance of the Unplugged Wedding concept. This is a clear instance where people are beginning.. Read more

BrainYno: the Ultimate Solution to Information Overload?

Posted on June 5th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The holy grail of Information Overload solutions Interruptions are a major component of Information Overload (indeed, they cause more harm than the rightly reviled second component, email overload, as I’d shown here). However, we’ve known for years that not all interruptions are created equal: the damage depends on the context. An unrelated phone call while you’re taking an exam certainly does more harm than one when you’re slouching in front of the TV. Microsoft Research had developed a wonderful application some years ago called Priorities, which looks at every aspect of a knowledge worker’s attentional context to determine whether to.. Read more

Will Gen Z Employees be Pre-wired for Collaboration in the Workplace?

Posted on September 10th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Uncategorized

Improving Collaboration in global teams is on most managers’ hot issues list. It has just occurred to me that for once, time may be on our side in solving this issue… The rise of the new multi-generational workplace  has brought much attention to the behaviors, expectations and perceptions of Gen Y employees, and HR people who have the bandwidth to look farther out are busy deciphering Gen Z, which will hit the workplace in a few years. Now, we all know that these young people communicate with their peers through social media and mobile devices, a fact that puts them.. Read more

Ubiquity

Posted on August 2nd, 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

Wrong solution?!

Posted on April 4th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was talking to a young manager in a hi-tech company and she shared an interesting insight. She had recently been equipped by her company with a Smartphone, and it had decreased her stress level at home significantly, she happily stated. Why so? Because, she explained, she was no longer afraid to miss out on anything – she could check her email during the evening as often as she wanted in order to see if anything urgent had come up. This is very interesting: before the arrival of the always-connected device, she couldn’t be connected – nor be on call.. Read more

Hooray! Graffiti for Android!

Posted on March 12th, 2012 · Posted in Off-topic

Love my new Samsung Galaxy S2 – but typing on its touch keyboard is hardly my idea of fun. And the handwriting recognition that came on it reminds me of  the notorious Apple Newton. Oh, how I missed the Graffiti system on my old Palm Pilot! Graffiti was a stylus-based handwriting system that improved the recognition by replacing some of the harder-to-recognize letter forms with simplified versions, while keeping most characters to a single stroke.  You needed a bit of practice to master it, but this was a minor and worthwhile investment, because the system had excellence performance even on.. Read more