Archive for October, 2008

The awareness problem

Friday, October 31st, 2008

The other day I gave a lecture about Information Overload at a technology conference. Afterward a number of attendees approached me to discuss it. I asked one of them – himself employed at a technology company – whether the extent of the problem in his workplace was as bad as I described it in general, and he asserted that it certainly was; no surprise there. But then he remarked that although he lives with the problem every day, my lecture was the first time he gave thought to this matter from this interesting and different angle… he was referring to the manifold aspects of the impact on knowledge worker  productivity, such as the longer time to execute tasks or the reduction in creativity engendered by constant interruptions.

This was a glimpse of a problem I think is fairly widespread – many organizations live with IO while being in a sort of denial about its impact on their actual business. Most everyone feels the immediate effect on their stress level and quality of life, but they don’t make the leap to realize that work output suffers as well.

I think that is one key area where we of the IORG can be of use – to raise awareness of what is really going on. If they don’t understand what it’s costing them, businesses will be unlikely to assign resources to fixing the IO problem!

What do you think?

Posted in IORG, general | 3 Comments »

EOM now recognized by Gmail!

Friday, October 17th, 2008

I can’t remember where I heard the EOM technique originally, though I was certainly teaching it widely at Intel as early as 1999, and it was published externally in 2001 as an “Intel Email commandment”. The idea is simple:

When possible, send a message that is only a subject line, so recipients don’t have to open the email to read a single line. End the subject line with < EOM> , the acronym for End of Message.”

I was pleased to read on the Gmail blog (via Lifehacker) that Google have added this as a feature to Google Mail; or rather, they made Gmail recognize it: if you add (EOM) to the end of your subject line, Gmail will skip the usual prompt asking you if you want to send the message without any text in the body.

Cool!

Posted in email | 2 Comments »

What would you like to see IORG work on?

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

IORG is a young organization, and we on its board of directors – Bill, Deva, Jonathan, Yoram and yours truly – are working hard to define the future course of action the organization should embark on in the next year or so. We have our ideas, but I’d like to hear yours.

So – let us know, in the comments to this post: what do you think we should do – keeping in mind that we must prioritize, given our limited resources at this point?

Do tell!

Posted in IORG | 7 Comments »

FINANCIAL CRISIS: A QUESTION OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD?

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

The breakdown of the nation’s financial industry plus recent events in financial markets worldwide have made me wonder about the role of information overload in the current financial crisis.  Headlines have made it painfully clear that financial institutions were unsure of their assets and liabilities.  Usually, this would be attributed to an inadequacy of available information but that’s far from the case here.

The Panic of 1907, a financial crisis in the U.S. during which the stock market fell almost 50%, was accompanied by a recession and numerous runs on banks.  Bank panics were not unusual at the time; the Panic of 1907 was the fourth to occur in 34 years.  [It's hard to compare recent bank failures, of which there have been 14 this year and only three last year, with the thousands of bank failures at the onset of the Great Depression.  Today's banks have far more customers and accounts than those much smaller banks.  As of today, JPMorgan Chase has more than $2 trillion in assets and is the largest depository bank in the U.S.  By comparison, Citibank has a mere $1.3 trillion in assets.]

Unlike the bankers of today, who cannot give clear and comprehensible explanations of their assets because their instruments are so complex they themselves do not understand them fully, the bankers who visited the home of J.P. Morgan in 1907, which had become a revolving door of New York City bank and trust company presidents as he attempted to stave off a complete collapse of financial markets, were able to present everything about their banks’ financial conditions on simple balance sheets that did not require pages of footnotes.

The financial markets have become far more sophisticated in the past decade; ever notice just how many screens a typical trader works with?  L. Gordon Crovitz recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal that better and more complete information was available in 1907;  the workflow device for traders then was a “simple pencil and scrap paper” but that’s all they needed.

The point is simple enough: rather than too little, we have far too much information today and that impedes our decision-making abilities and throttles our ability to resolve crises.  While Information Overload is certainly not a direct cause of the current travails, it nonetheless is playing a key suppporting role.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »