Jonathan B. Spira's Blog: Overload Stories, page 16

Jena McGregor: Company ban on email gives employees a break, and maybe a different type of headache

Jena McGregor of the Washington Post wrote the following on Dec. 12, 2011 in response to the Atos e-mail ban (previously covered on this site here)

I applaud Breton for trying to do something that streamlines his employee's workloads. For most professionals working in today's knowledge economy, information overload has replaced safety concerns as the No. 1 issue that affects their working conditions. And yet, it gets woefully little attention. Most leaders just pile on more ways to add to the information deluge, issuing Blackberries and laptops so that their people can be always on, all the time.

But as Jonathan Spira, the author of a book on data overload, puts it, "to paraphrase Sir Winston, e-mail is the worst form of messaging except for all the others that have been tried." There is a time and a place for it, and banning it could make people's jobs harder at times. What leaders really should be doing is urging—and more important, modeling—smarter and sparer use of the tool. That, and maybe banning the "reply-all" button.

 

Read the full post here.

Shutting Off E-mail? Think again!

I came to Overload book site after reading Jonathan Spira's comments on Atos's plan to turn off its e-mail system and I wanted to add my thoughts on e-mail today.

Over the course of one week, I measured the percentage of e-mails that were actually relevant for me to see.  Out of 725 e-mails, only 15% actually mattered.  This means that hundreds were unnecessarily sent to me and others.

The other thing I measured that week was the number of cc's on the unnecessary e-mails.  The average there was eight but it ranged all over the place from no cc's to hundreds.

Clearly, if you take what the Overload book says seriously (and I do), the costs in a company of 20,000 (such as mine) are huge.

Think of all the time we'd save if we actually just sent e-mails to the people who needed to see them.

Ban E-mail? Stop the Madness!

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Last week, Atos, a French IT company, announced a ban on internal e-mail.  Atos' management justified the action as a way to stop wasteful messaging.  It says that staffers get an average of 200 e-mail messages per day (the average, according to our calculations, 93), and that most are not "critical."

Atos wants to move conversations that would take place in e-mail to tools such as Microsoft Office Communicator instant messaging and face-to-face discussions.  Aside from the fact that managers there should read my "What Works Better When?" treatise, I have to wonder how it was determined that "most" of the e-mail exchanges were not necessary.

It's quite true that e-mail can be wasteful, and furthermore I'm willing to bet that Atos didn't even begin to calculate the cost of "unnecessary" interruptions, which would magnify the presumed cost of wasteful e-mail exchanges five fold in many cases.

What does trouble me to some extent is the amount of press that Atos' action has gotten.  While Atos' management may have indeed given some though to the problem, other managers may simply read the headlines ("Huge Company Bans Internal E-mail" was a popular one) and decide to pull the plug.

Does anyone remember No E-mail Wednesdays?  They were immediately followed by E-mail Tsunami Thursdays.

E-mail has become the prime means of moving information both within an enterprise and beyond its borders.  Is it the ideal means?  No, of course not.  But to paraphrase Sir Winston, e-mail is the worst form of messaging except for all the others that have been tried.

Instant messaging and social networks all have their place, but there are still many types of messages, ranging from out-of-office communications to thoughts that require a longer explanation, where e-mail is still the best medium.

Now, if we could all exercise a bit of control when it comes to the number of recipients…

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

New York Times Room for Debate: Should Workplaces Curtail E-Mail?

On December 5, 2011, the New York Times' Room for Debate colunm tackled the issue of workplace bans on e-mail.

Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our brains), William Powers (author of Hamlet's BlackBerry), Peggy Duncan (productivity expert), and Luis Suarez (IBM) all wiegh in on the debate.

William Powers notes that:

In his recent book, "Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization," the productivity expert Jonathan Spira reports that for every 100 people needlessly copied on e-mails, eight work hours are lost. One industry study found that a typical 1,000-employee company is now losing $10 million a year to such inefficiencies.

Read William Powers column here.

Read the full discussion here.

Jonathan Spira in Baselinemag: Seven Steps to Lower Information Overload

How to keep yourself sane and functional in a world awash in data.

Jonathan Spira

Baselinemag.com

12/5/2011

There's a lot being said about the problem of information overload, but not much being actually done about it. Information overload makes people less able to manage thoughts and ideas, contemplate, and even reason and think clearly. For many, it results in workdays that never seem to end, thereby destroying any semblance of work-life balance.

Research conducted at Basex shows that this problem cost the U.S. economy about $997 billion in 2010. Regardless of the job and individual, each worker loses somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of his or her day due to the problem. Since there are approximately 78.6 million knowledge workers in the United States, this issue is one that needs to be addressed.

In 2004, we began to observe a phenomenon that we later named "recovery time." Recovery time is the amount of time it takes workers to get back to where they were in their work or thought process prior to an interruption. According to our research, this takes somewhere between 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. A 30-second interruption, for example, could easily require five minutes of recovery time.

Interruptions come in many forms: phone calls, instant messages, text messages, tweets, social network messages. Plus, many knowledge workers have numerous self-interruptions.

Since interruptions can occur many times each day, even when they are short, the recovery time adds up and can quickly become a significant drain on the knowledge worker's internal resources.

Let's look at a few additional figures that were uncovered by our research:

•          A minimum of 28 billion hours is lost each year to information overload in the United States.

•          Reading and processing just 100 email messages can occupy more than half of a worker's day.

•          It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30-second interruption.

•          For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an email, eight hours are lost.

•          58 percent of government workers spend half the workday filing, deleting or sorting information—at an annual cost of almost $31 billion dollars.

•          66 percent of knowledge workers feel they don't have enough time to get all their work done.

•          94 percent of those surveyed at some point have felt overwhelmed by information to the point of incapacitation.

One thing that can be done is to take individual responsibility for the problem and act on it. Here are some suggestions that I've found useful:

1. Use restraint in communications. Don't copy the world; don't include more people than necessary in any communication; avoid gratuitous "thanks" and "great" replies, and avoid reply-to-all emails.

2. Read incoming email messages carefully. Don't assume the subject line adequately explains the message, or that the sender didn't bury the most important information near the bottom of the email. Our research shows that most knowledge workers read only the first paragraph of any given email.

3. Read outbound email messages carefully. Write clearly, and don't combine unrelated topics in one message. Make sure the subject line is specific. (Writing "help needed" without further details helps no one.) Make sure the subject line explains the contents clearly. Use an introductory paragraph to describe what the email will cover, if there is more than one item: "This message covers three topics, namely A, B, and C."

4. Think carefully when addressing email. Many people follow the "CYA" principle and send emails to far more people than necessary. Remember, for every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an email, eight hours are lost.

5. Maintain a correct status on instant messaging and monitor others' status before contacting them. If you unnecessarily interrupt people who are deep in concentration, it could take quite a while for them to return to where they were and recollect their thoughts—if they don't forget to return at all.

6. Argue. Learn to dramatically improve search results by using a few "arguments" such as "and," "or" and "near." Using these terms to refine your search can decrease the number of results produced, saving time. Fifty percent of all searches fail outright, but a further 50 percent that we think succeeded failed in some way, such as when they produce outdated or incorrect information.

7. Value your colleagues' time as if it were your own. If a response to an email is not immediately forthcoming, don't call or send an IM asking, "Did you get my e-mail?"

Full article available here.

 

 

How Do You Spend Your Day?

What did I do today?

Over the years, we at Basex have surveyed numerous areas of knowledge work, covering everything from Information Overload to document management strategies and habits.

One current area of  interest where we wish to expand our knowledge is that of the specific day-to-day activities knowledge workers undertake.  Building a clearer picture of how the day looks and the unique challenges knowledge workers face will help us identify pain points and productivity bottlenecks. When we publish our findings, it will help companies develop solutions and best practices that can make the knowledge workers' day less overloaded and more productive.

Please join us in taking this short survey, and receive a free executive summary of the results.

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

Siri's Little Brother TrapIt Wants to Find Things For You

You have very pretty lights TrapIt, but can you find me good information?

Finding relevant content is tricky business; not only is there an abundance of irrelevant content to confuse us and muddy the waters, but we often simply don't know something exists until we see it.  Traditional search fails us here because that method assumes we know what we are looking for in the first place, or that we possess the forethought to make some assumptions and pick out some key words to enter into the search bar.  Perhaps what we really need are intelligent tools that suggest things to us before we even know we are looking for them.

TrapIt, a new online content discovery tool, aims to meet that need.  TrapIt was developed by the same minds that created and then sold Siri to Apple (the Siri technology has now been fully integrated into the iPhone 4S).  Both offerings leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology that was developed as part of the CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) project, an AI project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).   Originally intended for military use, the cognitive software was designed to learn from experience, take orders, explain its own actions, and respond to unexpected input.

The key difference between the two is that Siri is a virtual assistant that responds to your verbal commands to do tasks such as setting reminders or searching for information while TrapIt is designed to seek out the things that it has determined you will find relevant, without you having to ask for them.

TrapIt is currently in beta and delivers personalized content from over 100,000 sources based on "traps", which are essentially search terms that the user sets up.  Once created, a trap will automatically refresh itself with new content to be read when the user logs in, building a personalized homepage that reflect the user's interests.  Creating the trap "tablet usage" for instance creates a stream of content that relates to tablets and usage data.  The user is then prompted to give thumbs up or down to the content to indicate whether it is what he was looking for or  not.  When giving a thumbs down, there are options to indicate why, such as because it was not interesting, the source was not trusted, or the content was spam.  This helps to further refine the content that is suggested going forward.

The content that TrapIt collects is refined as TrapIt analyzes how often the user clicks on specific types of content, as well as through the thumbs up or down mechanism.    Because the AI learns as TrapIt is used, it is too early to tell from my tests how effective it will be at providing relevant content, but results so far are encouraging.

Siri, the first commercial application of the CALO AI, has been well received and is quickly becoming a popular feature of the iPhone (as well as being hacked to run on older iPhone models and platforms such as Android, or even to control thermostats).  Now that TrapIt is applying the same underlying technology to content discovery, we will have a chance to see how effective the AI really is, and if it can recommend content in a way that helps to cut through the clutter of information and get us the information we really need.

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

Guest Column: Sleep and Knowledge Work

Just one more text...

If you're staying up late reading and/or writing e-mail, doing work, reading online forums and news, catching up on social networks – and then find yourself sleep-deprived the next day, you're not alone.

Sleep deficiency is a major problem for knowledge workers who, due to increased mobility, are now more likely then ever to continue their work from home after leaving the office.  Even setting aside the pressure (some would even say the necessity) of answering e-mail messages or working on projects late into the night, the temptation of late-night recreational Internet and technology use is omnipresent.

Such behavior is considered poor sleep hygiene, a term that refers to one's habits and practices at bedtime as well as environmental factors that may influence the length and quality of one's sleep.

Consider the following statistics from the National Sleep Foundation's 2011 "Sleep in America" poll:

- 39% of Americans bring their mobile phone into bed with them and end up using it in the hour before they go to sleep.  The number is even higher for younger Americans, 67% of 19-29 year olds.  21% of Americans end up texting during this time.

- Those individuals that end up texting in the hour before sleep are more likely to report bad sleep and not feeling refreshed.

- 1 in 10 Americans is woken up by mobile phone alerts from texts, calls, and e-mail.  The number rises to nearly 1 in 5 for 19-29 year olds.

- 36% of Americans use their laptop in bed before they go to sleep, and this group reports that it is less likely to get a good night's sleep.

Why does this matter?  Surely we are able to deal with the loss of a little sleep in exchange for getting out that important e-mail or sending that last text of the day, right?

Unfortunately not, according to the UK-based Mental Health Foundation.  The organization's 2011 "Sleep Matters" report notes that individuals who experience even mild sleep disorders are four times more likely to have relationship problems, three times more likely to lack concentration during their work day, three times more likely to struggle to accomplish tasks at work or during their day, and over twice as likely to suffer from energy deficiency.

Last week (in case you missed it due to being tired) was Drowsy Driving Prevention Week, a public awareness campaign by the National Sleep Foundation to highlight the issue of sleep safety.  To put the problem in perspective, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that drowsy driving results in 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and more than 100,000 accidents each year.  The National Sleep Foundation estimates that drowsy driving is involved in about one in six deadly crashes and one in eight crashes resulting in hospitalization.

Presuming you are not nodding off while reading this, consider how lack of sleep might be impacting your productivity and effectiveness.  Before going to sleep, lay off e-mail and texting, and maybe even try just turning all of your devices completely off.

Sweet dreams.

 

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

 

Sharon Ann Holgate: Conquering Information Overload

November 4, 2011

Sharon Ann Holgate, writing for ScienceCareers.org, writes the following:

Do you dread your e-mail inbox upon returning from vacation? Do piles of unread journals grow like an organism on your desk? Do you feel as though no matter how hard you try to keep up, the information that you need to be effective as a scientist is spinning out of control? If so, you're not alone. Information overload is one of the common ills of our age, with new information being produced and disseminated at an ever-increasing pace.

Research by Basex, a knowledge-economy advisory firm, indicates that knowledge workers in the United States lose as much as a quarter of each working day to information overload. The resulting reduction in productivity — and also innovation — represents an annual loss to the U.S. economy of more than $900 billion, they found.

The losses aren't just economic; they're emotional and psychological as well. That feeling of being overwhelmed can damage your happiness and health — not just your work and career.

Full article available here.

Fixing E-mail

Is there a reply in there somewhere?

How many times do you send an e-mail message to someone and not get a reply?  Fairly often, I'd wager.

But how do you know and keep track of times when you don't get a reply?

Sometimes I think back, oh, I sent an e-mail and so-and-so doesn't seem to have replied.  When did I send it?  What was the subject?  Did I miss the reply?

When this happens, I first have to search for the e-mail that I had originally sent.  Sometimes that takes just a second, sometimes it takes a while.  Then I have to determine whether the question or issue is still important and, if so, what the next course of action might be.

I could send another e-mail but that could go unnoticed as well.  I don't know if the recipient saw the first e-mail or even if it actually arrived (e-mail delivery is not infallible).

I can then resend it, forward it, or forward the e-mail to someone else who may be able to help me.  In some cases, it might make far more sense to switch communications channels altogether and make a phone call or send an instant message (especially internally).

Of course, this is all predicated on my being able to recall that a.) I had sent the e-mail and b.) that no reply had been forthcoming.  Much e-mail goes unreplied to and some of it is actually important.

In the meantime, some important issues go overlooked and much time is wasted.  I probably become aware of at least one unanswered e-mail each day and figuring out what the status of that message is, as well what actions are required can take anywhere from five to 15 minutes.  If every knowledge worker in the U.S. dealt with this issue on a daily basis, we would find we lose 12.576  million hours on a given day, at a cost of $264 million (this is based on 78.6 million knowledge workers and 10 minutes or 16% of one hour lost).

Of course, what could be even more costly are the ramifications of an e-mail message which has perhaps not been acted upon or read or replied to.  It's impossible to calculate these costs but, in some cases, they can be significant, resulting in a loss of business, missed opportunity, or simply confusion and frustration for the knowledge worker who does not know if the e-mail was ever received and acted upon.

While there are several third-party Microsoft Outlook plug-ins and tools that address this issue, what we really need is an option in the out-of-the-box e-mail client (IBM, Microsoft are you listening?) that allows me to set a time period for receiving replies to flagged e-mail so that, when no reply is forthcoming within this timeframe, the e-mail client alerts me.  Sounds like an easy fix to me.

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