To see how, check this post on Commonsense Design, my other blog.

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?

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!

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!

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.

Now, during these trips we are typically hurried, harassed, and often exhausted with jetlag. So what is it that makes us more creative? I can speculate that part of it may simply be that when away from the normal office routine, away from the day to day duties of work and life, we are jarred out of some mental auto pilot mode. And certainly meeting new people from different organizations can lead to cross-fertilization of ideas (after all, that’s why I started IORG - to get and give the opportunity to talk to diverse professionals). But part of it is the fact that these trips may be the only time we have away from interruptions!

With knowledge workers interrupted every 3 minutes on average (that amazing finding by Prof. Gloria Mark et al in UC Irvine), it is not surprising that the respite of even a few hours away from it all - away from telephones, colleagues, cellphones, SMS, and incoming mail - can make a huge difference. Ah, being alone in a quiet hotel room, with one’s brain and computer but no outside distractions…

In fact, there is a classic story from the history of technology that illustrates the power of such a room. William Shockley of Bell labs is credited as co-inventor of the transistor in 1947. The actual fact is that he wasn’t; he was the team leader, but his teammates - Bardeen and Brattain - invented the point contact transistor without him. When he realized he’d missed out on one of the most important inventions of the century Shockley was so annoyed that he locked himself up in a hotel room for a number of days, only emerging when he had a better implementation - the superior Junction transistor. But it took the locked room…

The problem these days is that the isolation of these trips is showing cracks. All hotel rooms now have network access. Cheap telephony can bridge distance (luckily, in my case, most of my trips span half the globe, so many who might interrupt me are fast asleep when I’m awake). And even the airlines, whose planes were once immune to any incursion, are playing with network and cellular access. Bad idea…

Maybe all it takes is to do what Shockley did - intentionally book a room and disconnect. But this is not a done thing; no company would fund it for its employees (they do send teams to various retreats, which may be great for the team’s joint thinking - but not individuals). Oh well…

]]> http://iorgforum.org/blog/2008/09/22/the-power-of-hotel-rooms%e2%80%a6/feed/ http://iorgforum.org/blog/2008/08/22/lots-going-on-in-the-information-overload-world/ http://iorgforum.org/blog/2008/08/22/lots-going-on-in-the-information-overload-world/#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:31:05 +0000 deva general research http://iorgforum.org/blog/2008/08/22/lots-going-on-in-the-information-overload-world/ IORG isn’t the only group of people interested in the problem of information overload.  Here’s a glimpse at some of the other stuff going on in the IO world.  On the academic side, a workshop on enhanced messaging was held at AAAI 2008 with a bunch of interesting presentations.  In the media, there have been a flurry of articles revolving around the problem of information overload that I’ve been informally collecting on this FriendFeed page (where anyone is welcome to submit links and comments).  We’re working on an updated and upgraded version of our IORG resource center to collect links to research papers, articles, and much more information around IO.  And the business world is starting to take notice as well, with industry conferences like Defrag springing up to address IO topics (full disclosure - I’m speaking at Defrag and know the organizers).  It’s great to see so much activity around this problem!

Keynote
The keynote address (mine, actually) presented an overview of the problem, including costs, problem areas, and a few things we can do about the problem right now.

Just to review:

• The cost of unnecessary interruptions plus recovery time (time spent getting back to where you were, if indeed you do get back there) to the U.S. economy is $650 billion as of 2007.
• Most interruptions are neither urgent nor important (but we think they are as we go and interrupt people anyway).
• The above represents 28% of the knowledge worker’s day.A mere 12% of the knowledge worker’s day is spent in thought or reflection.
• We spend 15% of the day searching for things and 20% in meetings.

Food for thought:

• We send too much e-mail.  When “cc” meant carbon copy, we could send three or four.  Now we think nothing of sending 300.  Let’s rethink that.
• Our need for instant gratification (perhaps fueled by the founding of Fedex, which introduced overnight delivery in 1973), causes us to interrupt others when we don’t get an immediate answer; our (mistaken) belief that everything we are doing is both urgent and important lends a false sense of importance to our mission and that too causes us to interrupt others too much.
• E-mail is like Tetris.  As soon as you line up the boxes, more come down.
• Think before clicking reply-to-all, or even sending a reply of “Great. Thanks.” acknowledging someone’s e-mail.

CIO Panel
David Goldes, Basex’ president, presented Max Christoff from Morgan Stanley, Shari Pfleeger Lawrence from the Rand Corporation, and Nathan Zeldes from Intel, talking about the problems their organizations face with respect to information overload.

To review;

• An Intel employee receives 350 e-mail messages per week on average (but executives receive an average of 300 per day)
• At Morgan Stanley, the average employee receives 625 e-mail messages per week (but the average executive over 500 per day).
• Intel employees spend, on average, 20 hours per week managing e-mail.

Key insight:
According to Christoff, the competitive advantage we gained from getting more information faster is starting to disappear.  Companies need to focus on how to provide more relevant information where it’s needed.

Visionary Vendor Panel
Borrowed conceptually from Basex’ Strategic Thinkers conferences, the Visionary Vendor Panel was a forum for thought leaders and visionaries. Companies were selected because they are both innovative and offer solutions that could lessen the impact of Information Overload.

• ActionBase (Eyal Maor, CEO) - ActionBase cuts down on e-mail by introducing structure to workflow that gets action items to the right people, at the right time.
• ClearContext (Deva Hazarika, CEO) - ClearContext provides a tool for Outlook that helps knowledge workers identify and contextually relate important information.
• Quick Comments (Greg Petras, CEO) - Quick Comments is a tool that enables users to quickly extract relevant information from feedback and comments on a product, content, or expertise without sifting through pages of written comments.
• RescueTime (Tony Wright, CEO) - RescueTime is a tool that keeps track of how much time is spent using various applications, such as e-mail, word processing, Web browsing, etc.
• Seriosity (Leighton Read, Chairman) - Seriosity allows e-mail senders to compensate recipients with “Serios”, a form of online currency developed specifically for e-mail, creating an economic incentive to deal with more valuable information first.
• Siemens (Ross Sedgewick) - Siemens OpenScape allows knowledge workers to find colleagues faster, cutting down on wasted time and phone and voicemail tag.

Bit LiteracyMark Hurst, founder of Creative Good, spoke about the virtues of an empty inbox and the three “D’s”: Delete, Defer, and avoiD.  Computer literacy, according to Hurst is not sufficient.  Knowledge workers need to develop a far greater fluency and literacy in the use of e-mail, file management, managing images, and managing tasks.  E-mail overload, according to Hurst, is caused by “the lack of to-do management.”  Tools such as gootodo.com go a long way in reducing e-mail overload.

No Time to Think

Not surprisingly, that was the title of David Levy’s presentation at the event.  Levy presented a fascinating paradox, namely that, just as we are creating new tools for knowledge work and collaboration (and as our economy is becoming more knowledge based), we are losing the time we need to think.

Levy referenced Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock who, in her studies of corn plants, was able to take enough time to look and hear what the material (her corn plants, specifically) was able to say to her.  Indeed she exhorted people to be contemplative, to “take the time and look,” but in many cases this was met with puzzlement.  Technology has continuously accelerated the pace of research and that appeared to be incompatible with her more contemplative view.

Levy made a solid case for setting aside time for contemplation although he pointed out an interesting paradox: the inspiration for today’s knowledge sharing and collaborative tools comes from Vannevar Bush’s memex, a portmanteau of “memory extender,” which he wrote about in his landmark article “As We May Think” in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Bush envisaged tools that automate the more mundane and routine aspects of knowledge work, freeing up the knowledge worker to have more time to think.  Unfortunately the introduction of more technology did not achieve this goal.

Levy also looked into our leisure time as examined by Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher Josef Pieper.  For the ancient Greeks, leisure was not merely free time but a goal of the highest order.  Pieper, writing in post-Second World War Germany, saw a nation in danger of being all-consumed by work.  Germany was in danger of losing its leisure time, as defined by the Greeks.  The accelerating pace of work can best be described in a decline of the work-life balance and the attempt to multi-task at sporting events and other leisure time activities.

Levy’s solution is to reintroduce more contemplative practices into both work and academic settings.  While it will be hard to undo the damage caused by multitasking and information overload, finding more time to think, via contemplation and meditative practices, will hopefully offset the damage that these problems occasion.

Driven to Distraction

Last but not least on the program was Maggie Jackson.

Jackson was one of the first journalists to interview me on the topic of information overload; she writes for the Boston Globe (a fact that led me, until a month or so ago, to believe she lived in Boston) on the topic of work-life balance.

Jackson’s book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, was recently published and, given her knowledge in this field and the timing of her book, I thought it appropriate to invite her to speak about the book (and to sign a few copies as well).

The underlying theme of Jackson’s book is the erosion of attention, attention to work, attention to information, even attention to eating and leisure activities.  If we continue to squander how we use attention, we may descend into an era where emptiness rather than fulfillment rules, where one never goes sufficiently in depth in one area because a virtual clock is ticking that guarantees something will intrude three minutes hence.

Yet all is not lost.

Technologies may appear to rule but the threat of machines taking over is not a new theme.  Rampant in science fiction and the cinema (think Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times), indeed S. Fowler’s “Automata” (1929) comes to mind (machines take over all human activities and eventually eliminate the human species).  A few others of this genre include E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), about a future earth where a central machine makes all decisions and caters to all needs through automated appendages (most humans live below ground and need the omnipotent Machine for survival) and Lionel Britton’s “The Brain” (1930), where a mechanical brain is the last and only form of intelligence on a doomed planet earth fifty million years hence (to its credit, it does contain all knowledge in existence).

George Parons Lathrop envisaged a 22nd century with automated factories run by a single person at a keyboard in “In the Deep of Time” and Jules Verne’s “Paris in the Twentieth Century” foresaw giant calculating machines that resembled “huge pianos,” also operated via a keyboard.

But back to Jackson, who argued that our inability to focus portends an impending Dark Age, which would translate to our civilization’s decline despite technological advancement.  While the world becomes a global village, it has also become more fragmented and disembodied.

Distracted is well researched (although a good part of Jackson’s research is outside of the past half century), well rounded, reasonably focused on the issue (although there are inexplicable detours, such as the cultural history of the fork), and it should be required reading for every knowledge worker.  You can purchase a copy at Amazon.com by clicking here.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and Vice President, Research, of IORG.

Personally I always thought that senior leaders of nations have licked Information Overload. After all, one can’t imagine that the President of the United States slaves for hours each day over a flooded email inbox… he must have a dozen aides summarizing the news and distilling for their chief a beautifully short list of what he really needs to know…

Turns out I was wrong; at least Mr. Obama, who is quite close to that level, pointed out to Cameron that “the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking”; while Mr. Cameron highlighted the difficulty in doing so when he said “these guys just chalk your diary up”… their support system may facilitate scheduling and information processing but “Thinking Time” is still a rare commodity for a world leader. One shudders to connect this observation with the ample research about reduced decision quality and increased error rates that an overloaded work style causes.

I’d love to know what these two are doing about it… and we’d certainly welcome them as IORG members!

In upcoming posts, the people involved in creating this organization will introduce themselves (I’ll let Nathan, our fearless leader full of tremendous insights, go first!) and share their thoughts on information overload, why IORG is important to them, and the things they are excited about doing with IORG.  And of course we’ll be posting about various information overload research projects and findings.

We look forward to hearing from IORG members about what sorts of topics they are most interested in hearing about, as well as things they are interested in writing about and sharing with the IORG community.

Welcome to the Information Overload Research Group and the IORG blog.  We hope we’re able to make this a fun, informative, and interesting read!