Interruptions: Meh, but Distracted Driving: Deadly

October 1, 2009 at 3:57 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 Comment

Great article in the New York Times about distracted drivers: “At 60 M.P.H., Office Work Is High Risk” (part of an ongoing series).  I’ve shown a bit of skepticism in past entries about the extent of the cost of interruptions for information workers and the intractability of the problem.  I’ve said many of the interruptions fall into models that are either a net positive for the organization with closed-loop analysis, required by social contract, or better classified as social interactions and distractions.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t think distractions are a major issue.  Just that the cost, causes, and solutions are different for interruptions and distractions so it’s best not to blend them together.  For example, the messaging inbox is the most classic information worker distraction, but it can be dealt with by turning off toasts (for wired workers) or mobile devices.

I have also assumed that the task one is being distracted from is important, but not life critical such as performing surgery, disarming a bomb, sneaking up on an insurgent safehouse … or driving.  Distracted drivers are, in my opinion, a serious issue.

I think this issue decomposes into several parts and the NYT article is the first I’ve seen that does a good job of addressing most of them:

Shaking and shaming users: The ‘ol shake&shame is a one-two punch.  Start with horrifying anecdotes, articles, stats, and videos on how bad your behavior is without you knowing it.  Then follow with shaming by describing how inconsiderate these drivers are, how dumb it is (if it’s an editorial), how you’re not that important that you need to respond immediately, and end with its effects on the people and family of those injured or killed.

Legal: Can you successfully outlaw texting while driving?  It’s symbolic and, like seat belt laws, something that adds a slight risk of penalty after the fact if something happens (like tracing text messages to a conductor seconds before a crash).  Hey, it’s worth a shot for those extreme cases when something tragic results.

Psychological: How distractable are people?  Can they really multi-task?  Is it an addiction, ADHD, etc?  It certainly seems to me the majority of SUVs veering into my lane, driving real slow and then making a quick move, or running red lights slowly are on a mobile device.  And the research confirms my suspicions that technology like handsfree interfaces don’t solve the problem.  And while I think multi-tasking can work for information workers with coarsely grained, long-running tasks, I think it’s deadly for drivers.  There’s a fun game to test this at the NYT site.

Expectations: To what extent do the expectations of employers, customers, family, and other message senders drive the apparent need to respond immediately?  To what extent does an expectation of productivity later require culling messages now?  This is the part I’ve spent the most time thinking about and the NYT article finally sheds some light on.  No employer admits to requiring these responses (duh), but the plumber example shows how competitive pressure provides informal expectations.  I was in a cab going home from the airport on Friday and the taxi computer had popped up that a van was needed in zone 776.  My driver, since we were in a van, spent the next 10 minutes trying to rapidly respond to accept the pickup.  One time we came close enough to rear-ending another car that I was bug-eyed for a few seconds.  It seems the computer was smart enough to not allow him to claim the pickup for some reason, whether it’s because we were moving or the GPS noticed we were too far for him to promise a pickup (which would explain why my taxis always take twice as long as promised to arrive for pickups).

Success at getting people to stop texting while driving will depend more on managing the expectations of message senders for quick responses than it will on shaking&shaming, laws, or better research.  This goal is difficult to impossible depending on each situation.  “Feeling important” may be solvable with shaking&shaming, but for the plumber or taxi driver whose livelihood depends on picking up a job before the next guy gets it will be nearly impossible to reach.

Still, there may be some hope if the Domino’s Pizza example applies.  Domino’s advertising set an expectation for 30 minute delivery, but some large settlements for accidents prompted them to water down the expectation (to “satisfaction guaranteed”). I haven’t seen statistics on whether the settlements have decreased, but the goal was certainly that eliminating the expectation would eliminate the reckless driving behavior it caused.  Over time the same may occur to some extent with distracted driving.  For example, if a plumbing company anywhere in the US has to pay a multi-million dollar settlement and it goes viral on the news, you could see plumbing companies change their process to round-robin assignments or select randomly from all responses within the next 2 hours.

Cold Turkey Help for Digital Distractions

September 17, 2009 at 1:46 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | Leave a Comment

Great article in the New York Times on “Taming Your Digital Distractions“.  While it does follow the “e-mail and social networking = useless distractions” narrative that I find passe, so do most other articles, presentations, books, and studies on information overload.  So I can’t blame Farhad Manjoo for that. 

Besides, what I like is that it gets away from the empty pondering of what we’re doing to our lives and simple time management tips and, instead, provides a slew of actual technologies to try out.  I hadn’t seen these.  Here are the ones in the article and I’ve added links to each. (Note: I haven’t tried them, so this isn’t an endorsement).

  • WriteRoom (full-screen, single-tasking, simple word processing)
  • Dark Room (full-screen, single-tasking, simple word processing)
  • RescueTime Solo (attention shielding and metrics)
  • LeechBlock (attention shielding for Firefox)

While some information overload evangelists would hope these cold turkey tools would demonstrate to someone how addicted they are, I actually would hope for the opposite: that after an hour or so of getting work done they realize they didn’t really miss those distractions and that their social networks didn’t come crashing down because some responses were delayed. 

Once people realize that poor decisions cause their information stress rather than bad evolutionary wiring in their brains or addiction, I think they are more likely to make useful changes to their work processes to improve their efficiency.

Information Overload Movie Clip

August 25, 2009 at 10:29 am | In Attention Management, Fun, Information Work, communication | Leave a Comment

Picture this situation: a businessperson on a plane checks her email inbox on her laptop and finally goes bonkers at how the emails keep piling up and never end.  The constrained ability to move on the plane and similar lack of control over incoming email leads to a sudden desire to escape.  A nearby passenger tries to shake this woman to her senses, but then another passenger wants to try too.  Now, here comes a professional information overload pundit!  The pundit comes over to shake her up and try to get her to snap out of it by realizing what “we” are doing to “ourselves” with this constant need to communicate.  But then more pundits show up – a book author here, a consultant there, a blogger/columnist next – all trying to outdo themselves on how to shake this woman to her senses.

Well, you don’t need to picture this in your head.  Just click on the link below for an accurate recreation of this event.

Get a Hold of Yourself!

Get a Hold of Yourself!

Yeah, it’s just like that.  While they all seem to want to help, the sheer mass of them and desire to out-shake the last pundit makes them seem a bit too gleeful for the opportunity to slap her around.  It’s not tough to slap someone around on information overload – most people are guilty of poor attention management processes and most people feel info-stress from time to time.  It turns out, it’s so easy to slap people around on information overload that it’s actually fun – even cathartic! If only her seatmate would have tried to talk to her instead of slapping her down, this might have ended better …

Enough With the Information Overload Manifestos, OK?

August 24, 2009 at 1:42 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, communication | Leave a Comment

“Not So Fast: Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication”, By John Freeman (WSJ 8/22/09 p W3), is yet another “shake you to your senses” information overload 101 article.  I found it noteworthy because it explicitly defines itself as a manifesto, two years after I explicitly noted that getting away from manifestos is what is needed to make the best of the proliferation of information and content while minimizing its worst effects on businesses and workers. (Note: I avoided guru-tense and didn’t word that as “while minimizing the disastrous impact this is having on us and our ability to think and reason …”). 

I will read the book because it’s my job to read these things, but there’s no need to wait since a good book already exists on the need to slow down: “In Praise of Slowness”, by Carl Honore (my review is here).

Here is the comment I entered to the article on WSJ.com:

This is a very good information overload primer – particularly the parts about making conscious decisions about where the “finite well of our attention” is focused.  But what Mr. Freeman has done is provide a manifesto at precisely the time that the opposite is needed: for all the information overload pundits to put the evangelism aside and focus on a path to improvement that embraces both sides of this debate.

Getting heads nodding by describing what “we” are doing to “ourselves” (always in guru-tense) is easy.  Nomiki (who has commented a few times here) shows that not everyone should be included in that “we” as some have learned to adapt their expectations and tool usage to minimize their info-stress while not demonizing or sacrificing what the information age has to offer. 

After my first year of covering information overload I recognized that the evangelical aspect of the narrative that “Not So Fast” follows is counterproductive.  In fact, Mr. Freeman’s manifesto was published two years (give or take a week) after I published my “Manifesto-free definition of attention management”. 

An excerpt: “The debate is over whether we are at a tipping point that necessitates a radical change in approach – an ‘information intervention’ – or just seeing an incremental but manageable increase in information velocity. Those who argue it is an incremental increase often disregard the rest of attention management as the result of unwarranted alarmist thinking.

That’s unfortunate because this emerging field has a lot to offer regardless of whether one believes that we are at a hand-wringing crisis moment or not … What is needed, then, is a manifesto-free definition of attention management. One that doesn’t require purchase of a belief system to understand.”

For those interested in a manifesto-free approach to this situation:
http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/a-manifesto-free-definition-of-attention-management/

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

What to Do The Day After Information Overload Awareness Day

August 13, 2009 at 8:45 am | In Attention Management, Culture, Information Work, etiquette, interruption science | Leave a Comment

So, you’ve survived Information Overload Awareness Day.  Your eyes were opened to the stress, poor decision making, and cold hard cash being sacrificed on the altar of our always-on, always-connected, go-go-go culture.  Now what do you do?

Well, first I’d recommend coming down off the mountain a little bit and taking a view of the issue from the ground.  Consider that the proliferation of information and communication channels should not be seen entirely in the negative (the “overload” problem).  The implication is that if you don’t feel the problem, someone must not have shaken you hard enough with studies on stress, the difficulty of finding things, or put a big enough number on the cost. 

Some exaggeration (or, to be more accurate, exclusive focusing on the negative) may be useful to shake people awake and scare them straight.  But there’s a risk they will become hysterical or stare into space.  After all, once one can see the information apocalypse is neigh, one has to figure out what to do about it. Those who do little gain only a sense of futility; they can see what is happening but do nothing about it.  While those who do too much risk vast unintended consequences.  Social bonds and efficiency suffer when people behave selfishly to shield themselves from interruptions that are unnecessary (to them).  Short lived attempts to change etiquette result in long-term feelings of bullying and reduce the effectiveness of future attempts.  Once-a-week time-outs (of e-mail, meetings) just shift the burden to other days while avoiding a root cause of the inefficiency: messages maintaining their channel without being pulled forward or pushed back as needed.  

I believe that an organization-wide, systemic, balanced approach that aims to improve efficiency for all workers is preferable to defining the situation in negative terms which start a war in response that can have vast unintended consequences. You can do take a balanced view by starting to think about:

  • A model (enterprise attention management) to organize, elicit (as an intuition pump), and communicate potential improvements that can increase the efficiency of a large number of workers (a systemic fix) rather than just personal tips on how any one person interested can help themselves
  • Who are the couple of people in your organization that can have a positive impact on the attention management abilities of everyone in the company?  What can executives and owners of communication systems do that is more than what any one individual worker can do?  
  • “Closed loop” rather than selfish view of interruptions.  Consider each interruption as an interaction between the interrupter and those interrupted and determining, as a whole, if it was useful to the organization. So what is a real interruption in your business?  What is “interrupted” versus “distracted” and what is an “unnecessary” interruption (does the person doing the interruption ever think their interruption is unnecessary and if not, who gets to judge)?
  • How social contracts and organizational structure influence interruptions and information flows in ways that aren’t captured in overload calculations and may result in unintended consequences if disrupted
  • How technology can help.  Technology is not the answer, but it’s certainly a lot of the problem and, accordingly, can be a participant in an improvement approach.  With a model in place, attentional capabilities of tools can be enumerated and used to their fullest extent to address known problems
  • Teachable moments.  Much of the information overload is due to etiquette and culture, but browbeating people to change their ways has little effect.  It’s been said that you can’t force changes in culture, but yet there are certainly cases where culture has been drastically changed.  Part of the answer lies in exploiting teachable moments to make positive changes in counterproductive communication and information management behaviors
  • Pacing.  Try to get a realistic idea of how much improvement you can actually target.  Even if 28% of workers’ days are wasted, 0% isn’t the proper target.  Step back and think about what the real target should be to get a realistic picture of potential cost savings. By all means, use the Basex number as an example of one extreme way of estimating it, but follow up by talking about the importance of determining a realistic goal for improvement.  Once you get executives to buy into a strategy based upon dollar savings rather than quality and speed of decision making and employee retention, you’ll be expected to prove how much you’ve saved in hard dollars later. Don’t use a sum of personal observations (rather than closed-loop), depend on colloquial and self-determined definitions, or build overall angst into your number

So, it’s a good thing if IOAD created an awareness that wasn’t there.  But the real value comes now – the day after – when organizations struggle with how to approach something described as such an enormous problem with tendrils in sociology, psychology, physiology, technology, and business.  My recommendation is to leave the negative framing (“overload”, “problem”) and self-helpy, guru-talk aside.  Now is the time to recast the issue in terms of systemic efficiency that can be analyzed with a conceptual model and target improvements that are both reasonable and achievable.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Notes From Information Overload Awareness Day

August 12, 2009 at 8:11 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work | 1 Comment

I tuned into today’s presentations for Information Overload Awareness Day and, despite dreading a rehash of “information overload 101″ with lots of guru-tense (what “we” are doing to “ourselves”) and e-etiquette and productivity tips, there was quite a lot of good information there.  Here are my quick notes for those who didn’t sit through all 5 hours (!).  They are strongly biased by my views, which had me looking for material that had to do with organizations, a systemic approach (rather than grass-roots, individual tips), and real solutions.

I’ve heard Jonathan Spira speak a few times before, and Ifeel he did a better job this time of acknowledging the sophistication of the audience.  In fact, he started out by saying “I’m preaching to the choir here”, which is indeed one of the problems with all information overload books and presentations.  They cater to the converted and are mostly about confirming what they already believe or teaching them how to proselytize others.  He also agreed that a lot of this is common sense.  I was happy to hear him mention the value of focusing on systemic fixes and note that only a fraction of the total “information overload” estimate is recoverable (he said 10-20% in the first year).  He was a bit rushed due to technical difficulties though.  Handy hint to all speakers: your audience wants to hear you talk, not see the slides.  Sure, they want them for later reference, but few listeners will be disappointed if you say you’re going to go ahead and talk without PowerPoint!  If the projector isn’t working or the computer crashes or the web conferencing isn’t working, they’d much rather hear you talk than wait 25 minutes for the slides to be ready.

Nathan Zeldes’ presentation was the best.  When we talked last year we agreed to disagree on some aspects of information overload (such as whether it’s OK to lump distractions into interruptions.  Oh, and of course whether I should get to speak at an IORG event on a more moderate assessment of the problem!).  But his presentation hit on many of the points I find to be of more value for enterprise listeners on this subject: focusing on large organizations rather than individuals, the idea that everyone complains but nobody does anything about IO.  Some of his solutions I liked (software tools, training drives – if teachable moments can be exploited).  Some I didn’t: group contracts (e-mail free Fridays), evangelizing to senior management.

I wasn’t too fond of the Maggie Jackson presentation.  She’s a very good presenter and her book (“Distraction”) is doing great, but the overwhelming use of guru-tense turned me off.  If she said “we” and “our” less than 100 times I’d be surprised.  I like to make up my own mind, not be told what I and everyone around me is doing.  There was lots of the usual IO setup: the value system of the Western world, our 24/7 gadgets, why we can barely keep our inboxes under control, etc.  At the end though she hit on the science of attention as the “root of how you deal with this environment”.  That does hit on the approach I think yields the most workable solutions and I wish the whole presentation was on that. 

Christina Randle of The Effective Edge talked about info-stress.  I agree with the idea that not closing off work threads causes stress through mental juggling.  But this is not “caused by overload”.  My worst experiences with waking up in the night with work thoughts running through my head were when I was project manager for a single project and it was the frustration and complexity that caused it, not too much information.  Also, she falls into the common trap of using the 3-7 items in memory research that actually relates only to very disconnected phrases. 

Ed Stern of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, talked about expert systems to help sort through information (i.e., asbestos codes for OSHA).  Neat – I did my master’s thesis on this topic for interpreting collections data at a credit card company, but he got this off the ground in a much bigger way.

Mark Hurst of Creative Good described a Buddhist approach – the zero inbox.  “In this digital age we have to let things go to achieve happiness.”  Great – one hand clapping for you Mr. Hurst.

Ken Sickles of Dow Jones brought up business performance as an IO problem.  Very good point – and I’ve always said it’s the only one I’d try making to management unless you know they feel like being preached to.

Seth Earley talked about search disambiguation and faceted search.  Yes, they do help cut through all the information out there, although it’s only one part of the problem. 

So there’s my summary of the day.  I still would put much more emphasis on solutions than problems, cut 90% of the repetition of the basic IO spiel (or add a second “201″ session.  Jonathan: give me a call as this is what I focus on and I’m happy to help!), eliminate the evangelism and guru-speak to appeal to people whether they drink the IO kool-aid or not, and put more emphasis on attention.

Why I’m Dreading Information Overload Awareness Day

August 10, 2009 at 9:22 am | In Attention Management, Information Work, Web 2.0, communication | 5 Comments

The inaugural Information Overload Awareness Day is being held on Wednesday (8/12/09).  And I’m dreading it.  That may seem odd since I cover this topic as an industry analyst and any additional attention on my space is a good thing.  Also, I agree that too many people aren’t aware of how far down the slippery slope they’ve gone in terms of being interruptible at all times and trying to follow ever more information sources and communication channels.

The reason I’m dreading this is that most of the material I’ve seen from the folks putting this on overstates the problem while understating the solution.  So on one hand the problem is inflated to encompass insidious damage to our (worded in first-person guru tense) psyche, attention spans, and well-being, not to mention about $1 trillion per year (I dispute this).  And on the other hand the solutions offered up are menial: don’t use “reply all”, try e-mail-free Fridays (yuk), and a smattering of time management and e-etiquette tips.  That’s all fine for individuals (I offer my own personal attention management tips here, and Lifehack.org and 43 folders are full of tips).  But a systemic problem requires a systemic solution.

To their defense, I’m not the target audience for this information.  As it says in the title, the point of the day is “awareness”.  To make people aware it helps to shake people awake with a narrative tying the rise of communication technology to ADD to the broad arc of information work.  I’ve given that presentation myself and, I’ll be honest, it’s rewarding to do!  I got a very good response too, but after seeing many others do the same thing I realized it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

So I’m already aware.  In fact, I’ve become a connoisseur of info overload articles, books, and presentations.  I feel like a movie critic who has seen every fish-out-of-water, buddy cop movie, making him disgruntled when a new release rehashes the cliche without offering anything new (even though the audience consists of people who are seeing the cliche for the first time and like it). 

The tough part is not putting on a day where you raise awareness of information overload, but figuring out what to do the day after.  That’s the day when the evangelical zeal wears off and you try describing this to your co-workers, many of whom honestly don’t feel that overloaded most of the time.  You can make a few personal behavioral changes and convince some others to do the same, but they have little impact and wear off soon.  And then you catch yourself interrupting people because you actually need to and they “tsk tsk” you saying it was unnecessary to them.  Then you find that of the 28% of your day that is supposedly wasted, really only a few percent of it can truly be recovered without treating every day like a nine hour sprint. Without any real solutions to survive the information deluge you come off like someone complaining about the weather.  “Bring an umbrella” as the morning show weatherman says over and over ad nauseam.

Enjoy Information Overload Awareness Day if you’re new to the subject, but the next day think about real actions that can be taken.  Think about a systemic solution, like Enterprise Attention Management which describes how to pull important information forward and push less important information back.  EAM avoids the moralizing about what you’re doing to yourself and others and doesn’t require adherents to be converts.  It shifts the focus to enterprise-wide efficiency rather than individual struggle.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

"Considerably Higher Costs" Indeed

June 23, 2009 at 6:13 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, communication, email | Leave a Comment

I recently posted a set of ideas for improving e-mail from the point of view of enterprise attention management.  It listed 15 ideas that would help e-mail users (which is pretty much everybody these days) to allocate their attention more efficiently to their daily tasks, whether that means more attention to some e-mails or less.

One of the items I listed on was this:

Remind sender if no reply

Avoid “dropping the ball” with e-mails by adding a simple checkbox indicating if an e-mail being sent should alert the sender if no reply is received within a given time (like 3 days). Too often post mortems indicate that a message was never replied to, the sender forgot about it (“fire and forget”), and the task was therefore left in limbo.

I cannot overstate the importance of closing the loop on communications between senders and receivers.  Especially when you combine important messages with “weak” connections (meaning they are unlikely to speak often and are unlikely to have other chances to reiterate the information and check up to see if a message was delivered).  Getting medical test results fits this pattern to a tee.  In fact, when I added this item as one of the 15 ideas, I did so knowing that it had a very personal connection to my life.  Today’s WSJ described why (6/23/09, pD4, “Make Sure You Get Test Results”).  I can’t find the exact article online, but here’s a summary from the USA Today:

No news isn’t necessarily good news for patients waiting for the results of medical tests. The first study of its kind finds doctors failed to inform patients of abnormal cancer screenings and other test results 1 out of 14 times.

The failure rate was higher at some doctors’ offices, as high as 26% at one office. Few medical practices had explicit methods for how to tell patients, leaving each doctor to come up with a system. In some offices, patients were told if they didn’t hear anything, they could assume their test results were normal.

… “If bad things happen to patients that could have been prevented, that will lead to higher costs and in some cases considerably higher costs,” Casalino said.

I can vouch for “considerably higher costs.” At the risk of being overly personal or melodramatic, the issue mentioned in the study was the primary likely contributor of the death of an immediate family member of mine last year.  When the “fire and forget” mechanism I describe involves a communication from a lab to a physician, that message can be important indeed.  In the case I mention, a message indicating a negative result and recommending more tests was sent, but the recipient claimed to have not gotten the message.  By the time the proper tests were run a few years later, the condition had progressed from highly curable (85% chance of survival past 5 years) to terminal (15% chance).

The “confirmed delivery” features of e-mail programs may be of some assistance, although in my experience recipients often do not acknowledge receipt and I’m not sure how consistent implementation is between e-mail systems.  Besides, what I’m recommending is the opposite – a “delivery wasn’t confirmed” response.  In cases like those described in the cancer screening study, “fire and forget” messaging can have very serious consequences.

Four Key Points About Enterprise Attention Management

June 22, 2009 at 4:09 pm | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 1 Comment

I’m just putting the finishing touches on a new document on Enterprise Attention Management.  This one will be a short primer on our view of the subject.  It’s been over two years since my main document on EAM was published and my thinking has evolved as I’ve hit questions from people at presentations and in private conversations.  It’s also been shaped by the press coverage of information overload and e-mail overload – often by encouraging me to put warning signs in front of some slippery slopes that they wander into: Counting all distractions as interruptions?  Lumping interruptions into information overload?  Using 100% focus and efficiency as the benchmark to compare “cost of overload” to?  Assuming only tips and tricks for individuals can chip away at it?  Yeesh!

After a brief description of what enterprise attention management is and its business context, I describe 4 points that are key for my position on EAM:

1. Not Everyone Feels Overloaded

As strongly as you and a few like-minded people may feel about the impacts of information overload, a lot more people just don’t notice or care.  But improving efficiency and reaction time: that’s something everyone can get behind.  Get away from having to shake everyone awake about the “problem” and its a lot easier for others to get on board with your efficiency argument.

2. Key People in an Organization Can Take Action to Improve Efficiency of Information Workers

You can try to organize your little information garden and give tips to your teammates to do the same and one small portion of your company will breathe a little easier.  But there are a few people who select the gardening tools and set expectations for everyone’s gardens – they have a different set of things they can do to help everyone in the organization.

3. Use EAM as a Lens to Understand Impacts of New Information-based Technologies

Enterprise attention management can be used as a lens to analyze how various technologies and programs will impact the attention of information workers.  One recent example of applying this architecture is the “EAM for e-mail” posting I did here.

4. Influence Process and Culture Selectively

An evangelical approach to “information overload” starts with declaring it “bad” and then figuring out how to force people not to overload each other.  A more practical approach does not see lots of information as good or bad, but rather focuses on efficiency and looks for key moments when processes and culture can be influenced.  These include teachable moments, such as new hire training or rolling out a new technology.  They do not include an e-mail blast or interoffice memo out of nowhere telling everyone how they should now behave.

Two Spots to Address E-mail Overload Suggestions

June 13, 2009 at 6:41 pm | In Attention Management, IBM, Information Work, email | Leave a Comment

In my last posting I listed 15 ideas for improving the attentional characteristics of e-mail (in other words, addressing “email overload” or “inbox overload”).  There are now a couple of efforts underway to describe how these ideas are currently or can be applied to popular e-mail clients.

First, Ed Brill of IBM picked up the gauntlet and summoned Lotus users to describe “which of these attention management issues you’ve addressed in your e-mail environment.”  I’ve been both a Notes and Outlook user and suspect Notes will fare a bit better when measured against an enterprise attention management yardstick.  I’m interested to see what Ed’s readers can tell about their environments.

And Jack Vinson of the Knowledge Jolt blog has created a wiki to track which e-mail products can meet these requirements and which cannot.  I encourage any and all e-mail experts to peruse the table and update it with information on how to accomplish these attention shielding tasks in each e-mail client. 

BTW – I think it’s important to note how difficult it would be to accomplish these modifications: default, one-click (contextual option the user can easily find and select), multiple clicks (buried in option lists; requires some assembly), third party solution, or programmatic.

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