Jonathan B. Spira's Blog: Overload Stories, page 13

Is Getting More Free Time As Easy as Withdrawing Money from an Automated Teller Machine?

I will use my new free time to go for a walk. Thanks Microsoft!

As part of a publicity stunt for its 4G LTE Windows Phones, Microsoft set up Free-Time Machines (FTMs) across the country.

What exactly is an FTM, I hear you all cry?

Similar to ATMs, the FTMs essentially dispense free time in the form of free grocery deliveries, cleaning and dog-walking services, or support from a personal concierge to random users. A few select FTM users will win a new Windows Phone.

This is being done to emphasize how using a Windows Phone creates, well, more free time.

I had to double-check the date of the news release. Indeed, it was April 9, not April 1 – but you can draw your own conclusions just from the very fact that I had to check.

To underscore the point (if such a thing were possible), the FTMs were staffed by Free-Time Engineers who’d do anything from standing in line for food or theater tickets, or delivering a meal.

The machines were located in New York at Bryant Park and Madison Square Park, in Chicago at John Hancock Plaza and Pioneer Court, and in San Francisco at Union Square.

Microsoft also engaged a few celebrities for this promotion, the purpose being to show how a smartphone (at least for the given celebrity, none of whom I had ever heard of) makes things “fast and easy” thereby saving time, helps you “stay on top of your game” (this was for a sports-related celebrity), and keeps you “connected” to your business (and to your fans, if you happen to have any).

The paradox here is that any phone – including a Windows Phone – is unlikely to have a positive impact on your free time. A well-designed smartphone can allow you to accomplish things you might have otherwise had to do in a less-efficient manner, but so far I truly haven’t come across one that actually gives me free time. If anything, I find that smartphones typically open up a Pandora’s box full of potential time-wasting activities that more than counter any gains I might see. Of course, if Microsoft would add a free time deposit option to their shiny new FTMs, we could surely find a way to withdraw that valuable free time when needed.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

In the briefing room: AwayFind

In the top right of the screen shot, the user has selected to be alerted via the AwayFind iPhone app.

The only thing worse than getting too much e-mail is not getting the e-mail messages you really need.  Missing an important e-mail message can have far-ranging implications, but the only way to 100% guarantee you won't let one slip by is to essentially live in your inbox.  Doing that is not an appealing proposition but you won't be surprised to hear that countless knowledge workers do just that.

The detrimental impact of e-mail overload has been very well documented, here and elsewhere, and the damage occasioned by the constant stream of interruptions resulting from constantly monitoring one's inbox is fairly self-evident.  Too much e-mail makes it harder to separate the wheat from the chaff, and revisiting the inbox every five minutes to see if anything critical has arrived is not conducive to focused, quality work.  Some experts, including Nathan Zeldes, president of the Information Overload Research Group, recommend only checking your e-mail a few times a day, at scheduled times.  Not a bad idea, but what about the e-mail with critical information that comes in right before a meeting on the topic, or the urgent e-mail that requires immediate attention?

AwayFind is a solution that attempts to bring a sense of balance to this challenge by allowing users to define what e-mail is critical and designating an alternative method of contact.  The concept is based on the idea that only specific e-mail messages are really important at a given time, such as one from a co-worker you share a project with as you near a deadline, or a customer you are finalizing a deal with.  AwayFind allows users to set up alerts for e-mail that is pushed out via a phone call, SMS, instant message, or notifications in an iPhone or Android app.

AwayFind uses a mix of automated rules for alerting users, as well as customizable rules for select time periods.  For example, the system monitors a user's calendar, and notifies them if an e-mail from someone who has a meeting scheduled has arrived.

For setting up custom alerts, AwayFind allows the user to pick a sender or domain name, and then specify a time slot.  This enables a user to stay away from his inboxe and, for example, go out for lunch knowing that if the one person that he's waiting for important information from sends an e-mail message, he will be notified.

AwayFind is an innovative idea and works on two distinct levels.  On one level, the tool has potential to be used as a filter for the inbox.  This would allow important messages to get through, while relieving the pressure of wading through the spam and non-critical messages that clog up the typical inbox.  Setting up rules for who is important, and recognizing that priorities change and must be adjusted, is a really valuable feature.

On another level, the product is significant because of the way it pushes notifications through numerous other channels.  This is interesting because it shows AwayFind understands that individuals make different choices in communications tools.  Some knowledge workers live in instant messaging environments, while others find that disruptive and instead prefer phone calls or texts.  Virtually all knowledge workers these days carry smartphones, and many already rely on apps running on those devices for everything from social network updates to calendaring notifications.  In theory, using AwayFind would allow knowledge workers to wean themselves off of the inbox and allow only the most important e-mail to get through, via the communications channel that they prefer.  Of course, this would also require knowledge workers to turn off new e-mail notifications from their e-mail client

For most knowledge workers, using AwayFind will not completely substitute for checking their inbox.  Too many random messages still come in everyday that we all have to comb through, and the ramifications of missing them can be severe (we also seem to actually like checking our e-mail, or at least feel compelled to).  What a tool such as AwayFind can do if used properly, is make it possible to check our inboxes far less frequently.  And that is no small feat.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex. He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

Is Information Hoarding A Form of Overload?

I just need a few more documents.

On March 27, The Wall Street Journal published a piece on digital hoarding in an attempt to extend the term from clothing, papers, books, and other objects to digital files and associated it with the problem of Information Overload.

I think it must have been a slow news day.

When I was writing Overload!, I gave more than just a little bit of thought to the potential problem of hoarding versus the more straightforward problem of Information Overload.

Having "too much information" coming at you or competing for your attention when you are doing searches is one thing.  Holding onto files – even thousands of them – when they are images and memories – doesn't strike me as an issue as long as they are reasonably organized and they don't become an obsession.

Most hoarding is harmless, be it digital or otherwise. And today, given the relatively low cost of digital storage, I see little reason why memories and other ephemeral items should not be preserved. In addition, the time spent going through thousands of files to see what should be preserved and what should be discarded could be time better spent elsewhere.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Why We Can't (and Won't) Disconnect

Some peace and quiet

This past weekend, I unplugged. It turns out that I did this on the National Day of Unplugging but that was purely coincidental.

Over the past few years, I've given much thought to the reasons why people increasingly feel the need to constantly glance at their smartphones, be it for texting, e-mail, news, social networking, or some other purpose.

Recently I was sitting at dinner in the Bay Area with a few people and one of them was glancing furtively at his iPhone. "Be social," the person sitting across from him said.

And I countered, "But he IS being social, just not with us."

Whether we like it or not, mankind has achieved a higher degree of connectedness and this is all thanks to a silicon-packed piece of plastic that we carry around in our pockets (the health consequences of which are, incidentally, not entirely clear).

In older days we had the market square, the commons. In fin de siècle Vienna we had the Kaffeehaus (coffee house).

These places were where we went and, in a way, they are where we go today, albeit in a rather virtual fashion.

We go to these social gathering places because while we are off engaged in some activity, our friends may be doing something else, presumably without us. We need to know what they are doing or we might miss out on something.

In addition to monitoring what others are up to, we feel compelled to broadcast what we ourselves are doing. Today, we do this with tools such as Facebook and Twitter but tomorrow it may be something entirely different.

We now both consume and generate these streams of information somewhat unconsciously (witness the case a few years ago of the pupil brought to the principal's office for texting, and sat there mindlessly texting while the principal berated him about texting in class).

We NEED to know what our friends are doing and we are no longer content to wait for a postcard or letter (or even an e-mail). We have truly evolved to a society that not only thrives on instant gratification but has brought instant gratification to an entirely new level.

It wasn't always this way. We were a patient folk. We waited a week or ten days for something to be delivered (now if something we order doesn't arrive by 10:30 a.m. the next day we are stalking the courier's truck on the Web).

So back to my unplugged weekend. My partner and I finally had a weekend together and we spent it in Carmel, at the Highlands Inn overlooking Big Sur. It was peaceful, the ocean waves were the biggest source of entertainment, and I had – well in advance of the trip – vowed not to do any work or check e-mail.

That enabled us to spend time together, doing the 17-mile Drive, enjoying the coastal highway, enjoying the local cuisine, and spending time together without the interference of our friends' activities.

The result: Not only was it a fun weekend but I felt refreshed and reenergized, ready for the challenges of the workweek. And I will do this again, real soon.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Why We Can’t (and Won’t) Disconnect

Some peace and quiet

This past weekend, I unplugged. It turns out that I did this on the National Day of Unplugging but that was purely coincidental.

Over the past few years, I’ve given much thought to the reasons why people increasingly feel the need to constantly glance at their smartphones, be it for texting, e-mail, news, social networking, or some other purpose.

Recently I was sitting at dinner in the Bay Area with a few people and one of them was glancing furtively at his iPhone. “Be social,” the person sitting across from him said.

And I countered, “But he IS being social, just not with us.”

Whether we like it or not, mankind has achieved a higher degree of connectedness and this is all thanks to a silicon-packed piece of plastic that we carry around in our pockets (the health consequences of which are, incidentally, not entirely clear).

In older days we had the market square, the commons. In fin de siècle Vienna we had the Kaffeehaus (coffee house).

These places were where we went and, in a way, they are where we go today, albeit in a rather virtual fashion.

We go to these social gathering places because while we are off engaged in some activity, our friends may be doing something else, presumably without us. We need to know what they are doing or we might miss out on something.

In addition to monitoring what others are up to, we feel compelled to broadcast what we ourselves are doing. Today, we do this with tools such as Facebook and Twitter but tomorrow it may be something entirely different.

We now both consume and generate these streams of information somewhat unconsciously (witness the case a few years ago of the pupil brought to the principal’s office for texting, and sat there mindlessly texting while the principal berated him about texting in class).

We NEED to know what our friends are doing and we are no longer content to wait for a postcard or letter (or even an e-mail). We have truly evolved to a society that not only thrives on instant gratification but has brought instant gratification to an entirely new level.

It wasn’t always this way. We were a patient folk. We waited a week or ten days for something to be delivered (now if something we order doesn’t arrive by 10:30 a.m. the next day we are stalking the courier’s truck on the Web).

So back to my unplugged weekend. My partner and I finally had a weekend together and we spent it in Carmel, at the Highlands Inn overlooking Big Sur. It was peaceful, the ocean waves were the biggest source of entertainment, and I had – well in advance of the trip – vowed not to do any work or check e-mail.

That enabled us to spend time together, doing the 17-mile Drive, enjoying the coastal highway, enjoying the local cuisine, and spending time together without the interference of our friends’ activities.

The result: Not only was it a fun weekend but I felt refreshed and reenergized, ready for the challenges of the workweek. And I will do this again, real soon.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

The Genie is out of the bottle and he can read your mind

What does your e-mail say about you?

The Economist last week reported on advanced linguistic analysis software that has been designed to "show an employee's emotional state over time." The software, developed by Ernst & Young, analyzes the content of e-mail communications to pinpoint potential problem areas. The example cited was monitoring e-mail for signs of employees who may be more likely to commit illegal acts.

The software is said to do this by creating a profile of a given employee's emotional state over a period of time. Said employee might be acting angrily or in a secretive manner and this might guide internal investigators in knowing whom to keep an eye on.

The software, which essentially mines the data in e-mail messages, collects and summarizes patterns. Because what might identify one group of employees as angry might be misleading when looking at another workgroup, humans examine the results and code them appropriately based on the person's job and workgroup among other criteria.

The human coding enables the linguistic software to adapt and learn industry-specific vernacular and speech patterns. For example, in the case of traders, the software is taught that swearing is common in that industry, and thus not an indicator of elevated stress levels.

Because this software is aimed at detecting events that might happen in the future in addition to problems that might be occurring in the present, its use is likely to be controversial. Presumably no one would have a problem if all it did was track down individuals who were predisposed to committing fraud and cheating investors, but the tool's other potential applications are chilling.

Let's look at how other companies have used data-mining tools to uncover information that people would not willingly disclose – or might not even be aware of themselves. For example, could the software identify a woman who is trying to become pregnant, resulting in her being passed over for a promotion? The retailer Target was recently profiled by the New York Times for doing something very similar, although they were seeking to target pregnant women with maternity-focused coupon offers by analyzing shopping data to identify the expecting women.

While it would be illegal for a company to deny a promotion on the basis of pregnancy or even a contemplated pregnancy, discrimination cases are common and do not always result in victories for the employees involved. The range of information that could be gathered by this kind of software opens the door to many other potential privacy issues, ranging from the disclosure of sensitive healthcare information to revelations about sexual orientation.

Ironically, while I was thinking about this topic, I stumbled across a New York Times piece that is a timely companion article to the Economist's. It details how in China Internet users are forced to use a creative system of slang and near-homonyms to evade what is officially referred to in China as the Golden Shield Project, or more commonly in the rest of the world as the Great Firewall of China.

By using words that are homonyms of censored terms, Chinese activists and regular citizens skirt around the algorithms that identify banned words. For example, "harmony" is a key word used by the government to justify censorship, so Internet users make use of the word hexie (which means river crab) to describe oppression. The word is a homophone and homograph to harmonious in Chinese pinyin (Latin script transcription of Chinese characters), meaning the terms are indistinguishable from one another. Censoring river crab would also censor harmony. Although government censors are aware of the double meaning, they cannot censor the word because it would disrupt their own messaging regarding a "harmonious society."

What worries me (and most likely others) is that the use of advanced linguistic software of the kind developed by Ernst & Young will not stop at monitoring internal communications for potential fraud. Technologies are neutral, but the use of them is not. The Great Firewall of China will be strengthened by this kind of software, and the potential for discrimination and privacy invasions will increase. Sure, some rogue traders will be stopped, but at what cost?

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex. He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

E-mail Marketer: Meet Information Overload

Please just stop

Have you heard from your favorite retailer recently? If so, it's probably been via e-mail and you probably didn't open most of them.

According to research by Responsys, a company that provides marketing tools, the top 100 online retailers sent an average of 177 e-mail messages to each customer in 2011, an 87% increase from 2007.

If you think that's a lot, consider that some retailers, led by Neiman Marcus, sent as many as 1.5 messages per day.

I've noticed this trend as well and decided not to unsubscribe to some of the more egregious offenders in an effort to capture some data points.

In my inbox, Restoration Hardware and Bloomingdale's are the top offenders.

On March 10th, Bloomingdale's told me to "Go Exotic In Trend-Right Tribal Prints" after having told me that "Ladylike Dresses [are] In Bloom" on the 9th. But that wasn't the only e-mail on the 10th: Exactly eight minutes before that e-mail came, Bloomingdale's told me about "HOT Things We Love" and that I could "Buy More, Save More!" if I wanted to.

The funny thing is that I'm not really a prospective customer for most of what Bloomingdale's is offering to me. Occasionally, the store gets it right and tells me about a men's department sale but 90% of its missives miss the target. As if to further illustrate how off-target the mailings can be, the next day, 11 March, was focused on "The Pleated Skirt." On the 13th, Bloomie's got a bit closer – it offered me 20-50% savings on "Home" items.

In the period of one week, Bloomingdale's sent 1.3 e-mail messages per day – all of them for products I wouldn't buy with the exception of possibly a few products for the home. And the store has never asked me to complete a profile indicating my interests, either.

Restoration Hardware also e-mails me incessantly. On the 10th, the store introduced its "deconstructed" collection and, on the 9th, I found out that the 900-page Spring Source Books were out (didn't we used to call them catalogs?). While it doesn't send me as much e-mail as Bloomingdale's, it does send quite a few offers and the only reason I am even looking at any of these is because I am writing this article.

E-mail marketing messages don't have any kind of special privileges when it comes to Information Overload. Just as knowledge workers miss critical work-related e-mail in their inboxes, they also miss much marketing e-mail as well. It's no wonder that the open rate and clickthroughs have declined significantly. Marketing firm Harte-Hanks found that consumers opened 19% of retail-related e-mail messages in 2007 (the clickthrough rate was 3.9% then) while the number dropped precipitously to 12.5% and 2.8%, respectively, by 2011.

Some marketers attribute the decline to burnout on the part of consumers but that only tells a small part of the story. The average knowledge worker received 93 e-mail messages per day in 2010 according to my research and that number is growing steadily.

The problem is that the typical knowledge worker simply can't manage 93 e-mail messages and still get work done, so it's no surprise that more retail-oriented e-mail messages are simply going by the wayside.

Put differently, and I am sure I am not alone, I would not have subscribed to any marketing messages had I not been interested in counting them and analyzing them. I typically make purchases when I independently come to the conclusion that I need or want something and I am very resistant to marketing propaganda. In fact, such efforts typically push me in the opposite direction.

In my conversations with marketing executives, I have learnt that they are unaware of the impact of Information Overload on their efforts despite the fact that they themselves admit to being overloaded. Perhaps if they put themselves in the place of the recipients of their missives, they might be able to come up with better and more effective e-mail campaigns that ultimately reduce the number of e-mails being sent.

[Editor's note: one marketer that seems to have the right idea is Newegg. I have recently noticed that after looking at some item on their website, and not making a purchase, a week or so later there would be a message in my inbox offering a handful of items fitting the specific category I looked at on the previous visit.-BA]

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

The Street: How to Boost Employee Productivity Despite March Madness

Jonathan Spira was interviewed by Laurie Kulikowski for The Street on knowledge worker productivity and how to keep productivity up during March Madness:

Jonathan Spira is the CEO and chief analyst of Basex, a research firm focusing on workplace and productivity issues faced by companies in the so-called knowledge economy and the author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization. He shared his knowledge of how to fix an unproductive workplace:

What are detractors to employee productivity?

Spira: We have a lot of trouble paying attention. We have developed into a workforce with very short attention spans, and that tends to be a problem because keeping a focus on something without self-interrupting is difficult. Self-interrupting counts just as much as you interrupting Bob or Susan. We also evolved into a society that is predicated on instant gratification. We also tend to get a huge amount of information in tiny, little nuggets. And studies have shown this barrage of information basically lessens our ability to absorb deeper and greater thoughts.

Throw March Madness into the mix with lots of news, everything we need to know about college basketball — and the more information we get, the more we're going to crave — so in this particular period of time there is going to be a bump up in this information flow that will result in further interruptions in our work and simply just make it that much more difficult to complete tasks and get through the day.

Read the full interview here.

Newsfactor.com: Anonymous Affiliate Steals 40,000 Credit Card Numbers

Jonathan Spira is quoted by Jennifer LeClaire on Newsfactor.com as she discusses the recent hacking attack by The Consortium:

It's not Anonymous, but it's an emerging group of hackers that claims affiliation with the infamous "hacktivist" group. Its name: The Consortium.

The Consortium is making headlines today for allegedly stealing the credit card records and other personal identifying information in a hack on porn site Digital Playground. The Consortium claims to have stolen information from more than 70,000 users of the Internet porn site.

"By and large, groups of hackers including Anonymous and the Consortium are putting large and small organizations on notice that they need to be far more prudent in securing their data," said Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous To Your Organization.

"Today, individuals and organizations have far more information to manage than ever before, and it's critical to ensure that the appropriate measures and safeguards are in place to keep information safe and secure," Spira said.

Read the full article here.

Financial Post: Is banning e-mails the answer to boosting productivity?

Ray Williams, writing in the Financial Post, discusses the contentious issue of e-mail and productivity.

Jonathan Spira, author of Overload: How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization, contends that information overload cost the U.S. economy nearly US$1-trillion in 2010 and that reading and processing just 100 emails a day can occupy more than 50% of a knowledge worker's day, because it takes five minutes for the brain to get back on track after a 30 second interruption.

However, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, in a New York Times article argues that email in some ways was a Godsend, because it relieved companies of the expensive and increasing volume of telephone calls. But, he says, email also "removed the cost, both monetary and social from personal communication."

For the younger generation, according to studies by James Katz, director for the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University, telephone calls were  replaced by social media platforms, and texting, because the communication is immediate and much more informal than emails.

Read the full article here.