KnowledgeForward

A couple of questions came up in my EAM presentation on Monday night:

Q. It seems that the EAM conceptual architecture is all about the receivers and not the senders or messages.

A. First, I need to mention that by “Enterprise” I mean intra- and inter-enterprise.  In otherwords, it doesn’t apply to companies trying to grab the attention of consumers.  That issue has its own fields of study: advertising and marketing.  My intent here is not to help advertisers scream louder or to help create more pointed messages to surgically skewer personalized targets. I’m trying to help organizations improve the effectiveness of their own information workers by examining how to enable them with attentional technologies and capabilities to pull important messages closer and push less important messages further back.

That said, in reviewing my materials I have to agree that I spend more time talking about how to help receivers of messages than senders.  Most of my research in creating my EAM architecture and the questions I have received from larger enterprises are about the information worker trying to sort through information, handle their inbox, and deal with interruptions.  Outside of consumer advertising you just don’t see a lot of studies on the other side of the coin: how people send messages or store content.  I think this is because a decade ago we shifted from an age of information scarcity to information abundance, as my colleague Guy Creese has written and as is well catalogued in David Shenk’s book Data Smog.

Most of the technologies, capabilities, and processes used by creators of information to make their information easier to find are more in the knowledge management (and, more specifically information management) domain than EAM.  These include use of content metadata, versioning, aging policies, use of taxonomy and ontology, navigation, and content repository architectural design.

What I do talk about is how enterprises can provide an appropriate set of communication and collaboration mechanisms for senders, provide guidance to senders on which channels and workspaces to use and how to use them, and put monitoring in place to be alerted to explosive trends.

Q. If this is about what enterprises as a whole can do, how come my examples are about what individuals can do (for example, setting email rules)?

As I quoted from Gary Masada of Chevron in my posting on Cornering the Corner Office about Information Overload: “Technology can be an enabler that helps people do this.  But in the end an individual will have to do it.”

I am not recommending that CIOs and owners of attentional technologies figure out how to organize the time and workloads of their information workers or start setting up filters for them.  There’s a level of indirection here - the owners deploy technologies and processes that information workers can then use to help themselves.

Ever since I’ve had my radar up on attention management issues, I’ve noticed many interesting techniques that people use to manage their time and attention.  While I’m generally focused on how entire enterprises can address information overload (what I call Enterprise Attention Management), I’m always on the lookout for what individuals do to help manage their time as well (personal attention management).  For anyone looking for an executive level view of personal attention management, I’d recommend listening to the first few minutes of this Channel 9 interview with Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft

Ray was asked how he balances the need to span a vast spectrum of activities and the need to go deep as well.  He said (rough quotes here since I am not that skilled at transcription)

Attention management is biggest challenge of the role; the pace is fairly brutal.  At the beginning of the year I’ll plan out how many hours I want to spend in different categories: some for high level strategic things, time with product groups, and I realized you have to create whitespace because day-to-day interruptions cause you to thrash if you just deal with incoming issues.  You have to create time to think about what’s happening in the environment.

I create whitespace by going away - international travel, “think week”, and other ways.  The best way I’ve found to clear my mind is to go to a conference that’s off the beaten path or go somewhere with my wife that’s not technology related.

When I was coding I had a four hour rule that said don’t code unless you know you’ll have four hours of contiguous time because otherwise you’re just introducing more bugs.

It’s the life management equivalent.

I’d recommend anyone interested in the cultural aspects of attention management to check out the special section in this weeks Economist.  In a bit of sociological research equaled only by Jane Goodall and her chimps, Andreas Kluth, San Francisco correspondent for the Economist, studies digital nomads and describes what makes them tick.  You can hear an interview with Mr. Kluth or check out the first article here, which has links for the rest in the series. Subscription may be required.

Hammers, guns, and Blackberrys are simply tools that surface the desires of the people that wield them, so the series correctly bypasses a discussion of the specific technologies used by digital nomads.  Instead he focuses on a wide array of topics about the culture of digital nomads, the work they do, and why they act as they do. 

The summary article at the start of the issue has a great description of the dangers of continuous availability and partial attention: “the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be).”

About the prevalence of nomadic work among knowledge workers, he writes:

James Ware, a co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative, a small think-tank, says that nomadic work styles are fast becoming the norm for “knowledge workers”. His research shows that in America such people spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafés, public libraries or parks.

The author differentiates nomadism from the archaic “telecommuting”:

Because it still tied workers to a place—the home office—telecommuting implicitly had people “cocooning at home five days a week”, he says. But people do not want that: instead, they want to mingle with others and to collaborate, though not necessarily under fluorescent lights in a cubicle farm an hour’s drive from their homes. The crucial difference between telecommuting and nomadism, he says, is that nomadism combines the autonomy of telecommuting with the mobility that allows a gregarious and flexible work style.

On how to make nomadic work work, he writes:

this requires “management by objectives rather than face time”. Not all workers thrive in such a culture; some prefer the structure of the traditional office. But “anyone who did well at college can work well this way,” he thinks. “The prof said ‘paper by Friday’ but didn’t care where you did it; it’s the same now.

I’ve posited some of my own theories about what drives email addiction, but the author quotes James Katz, a professor at Rutgers University, with another explanation:

This is, first, because of “random reinforcement”, the desultory pattern of rewards that comes with addictive behaviours such as gambling. A CrackBerry winnows through his e-mail throughout the day, knowing full well that most of it is chaff, but cannot help himself because of that occasional grain. The second reason, says Mr Katz, is that most people suffer from the illusion that more information always leads to better decisions, and there is always more information available on our phones and laptops.

I have had a productive day today.  I’ve had some difficult material that I’ve been trying to convey in a clear and organized manner for the new SharePoint workshop we’re putting together. But it really came together this morning and I got a lot of work done, including breaking through some stumbling blocks that had me stumped earlier this week. 

Frankly, I didn’t even think about why I was so productive today until this afternoon, when I got this email from our IT department: “As you are most likely aware, we have suffered from a prolonged outage of our Exchange Server … ”

The real kicker was the part at the end that said “We understand that a prolonged outage such as this has a profound impact on everyone’s productivity.”

Indeed!  The prolonged email outage did have a profound impact on my productivity … it made me more productive!  You see, my work on the workshop involves syncing information from a number of sources, reorganizing a lot of material, and creatively thinking of new material.  It’s a lot to keep in my head, mentally shuffle around to envision the information from different angles, and wait for sparks of creativity or insight.  As it turns out I had no meetings scheduled for this morning either, so without the distraction of email “toasts” popping up and no emails the couple of times I checked, my mind stayed focused on my task which yielded dividends for me. 

Coincidence?  Possibly, but my productivity spurt started at about 5pm last night and lasted a few hours, then continued this morning, which is exactly when the email system was down.  It may not be the entire reason, but I do feel it was a contributing factor.  I was doing exactly the type of information work (mentally juggling lots of information for the purpose of organizing, synthesizing, and sparking creativity) that interruption scientists say is negatively impacted by distractions and interruptions. 

Of course, I’m happy that email is working again.  There are a number of tasks that needed to be shuffled along and they would suffer damage if the outage had continued.  And not all my work is of a type that requires long-term focus.  I do apologize to a few clients who were trying to contact me and got a slower response than usual.  Now my challenge is to finish my work while the email system is back and working.

Is attention a muscle that can be developed beyond what you’re given, like biceps or abs? A ScienceDaily article “Meditation May Fine-tune Control Over Attention” describes how research has shown attention to be improvable (not fixed) and that meditation can be to attention what a set of dumbbells is to biceps.

a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that attention does not have a fixed capacity - and that it can be improved by directed mental training, such as meditation.

It goes on to describe the study:

Volunteers were asked to look for target numbers that were mixed into a series of distracting letters and quickly flashed on a screen. As subjects performed the task, their brain activity was recorded with electrodes placed on the scalp. In some cases, two target numbers appeared in the series less than one-half second apart - close enough to fall within the typical attentional blink window.

The research group found that three months of rigorous training in Vipassana meditation improved people’s ability to detect a second target within the half-second time window. In addition, though the ability to see the first target did not change, the mental training reduced the amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first target. “The decrease [of brain activity associated with the first target] strongly predicted the accuracy of their ability to detect the second target,” Davidson says.

The results of the study show that devoting fewer neural resources to the first target leaves enough left over to attend to another target that follows shortly after it, he says.

Because the subjects were not meditating during the test, their improvement suggests that prior training can cause lasting changes in how people allocate their mental resources. “Their previous practice of meditation is influencing their performance on this task,” Davidson says. “The conventional view is that attentional resources are limited. This shows that attention capabilities can be enhanced through learning.”

Seeing and mentally processing something takes time and effort, says psychology and psychiatry professor Richard Davidson of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and the Waisman Center. Because a person has a finite amount of brainpower, paying close attention to one thing may mean the tradeoff of missing something that follows shortly thereafter. For example, when two visual signals are shown a half-second apart, people miss the second one much of the time.

“The attention momentarily goes off-line,” Davidson says. “Your attention gets stuck on the first target, then you miss the second one.” This effect is called “attentional blink,” as when you blink your eyes, you are briefly unaware of visual signals.

But, he adds, the ability to occasionally catch the second signal suggests that this limitation is not strictly physical, but that it may be subject to some type of mental control.

A 2003 SceinceDaily article also mentioned this form of meditation as a way to “develop skills of focused attention”:

“Mindfulness meditation,” often recommended as an antidote to the stress and pain of chronic disease, is a practice designed to focus one’s attention intensely on the moment, noting thoughts and feelings as they occur but refraining from judging or acting on those thoughts and feelings. The intent is to deepen awareness of the present, develop skills of focused attention, and cultivate positive emotions such as compassion.

 I find just the idea that attention can be expanded to be fascinating.  I’ve seen a lot written about how make use of the attention one has (personal attention management tips, “go with the flow” stream processing, etc.), but most articles (including my own writings I believe!) start with the assumption that the amount of attention people has is fixed and the amount of things to pay attention to is rapidly growing.  This is behind the “attention economy” theory (Davenport) which says economy is the allocation of scare resources and therefore attention can be thought of as an economy.  Granted, I doubt any amount of meditation would help one to absorb a few hundred emails a day, follow a few hundred blogs, process twitter “tweets”, and still get a real job done.  But it does challenge a fundamental assumption of attention management.

Today’s Wall St. Journal article “A Day Without Email Is Like …” by Sue Shellenbarger (10/11/07, p. D1) offers another romp through the “Email-free Fridays” topic. I believe these articles tend to come out on Thursdays, as this one does.

This new article from Ms. Shellenbarger gives many more examples than most articles on this subject which just mention one or two. Generally the examples are tech companies (where would business science be without tech companies to try every wacky idea like email-free Fridays, chefs for the employees, casual dress codes, …?).

I find it interesting that you don’t hear about bans on other communication mechanisms. Where are the Cellphone-free Fridays? IM-free Fridays? Phone-free Fridays? Blackberry-free Fridays? It seems email has become the alpha communication mechanism and gets all the slings and arrows accordingly.

I wrote on this topic back in March and still feel that email-free Fridays may be useful as a temporary trial to raise awareness of email dependence, but not a long term strategy. I also wrote last month that I think that our need to accomplish tasks - to get things done - is challenged by the increase in information work with undefined goals and processes and that email is being used like a drug to get a hit of accomplishment when one feels he is spinning his wheels.

Cutting off email cold turkey just points out the problem, but still leaves information workers and organizations searching for a solution.

I wrote yesterday about the value of placeholding as an interruption management technology.  I believe placeholding is an important but rarely mentioned benefit of virtual and web/online desktops (see ”Technology Review: Computer in the Cloud” and “Is the World Ready for a Web-Based Desktop?” ). 

An online desktop is using a desktop like the Windows desktop from within your browser.  A good list of online desktops is in the Wikipedia article on “web desktops”.  Usually web desktops are touted for their portability, manageability, and low cost, although they are not widely used.  I consider the web desktops out there today more like proof of concepts.  Obviously issues with performance, available software, and offline usage will be difficult hurdles to get over.  But the part I want to concentrate on is the ability that some of them have (Peepel for example) to have tabs on the side of the desktop that let the user immediately switch between desktops with all window placement, icons, and applications states intact.  And since these desktops are online, they are persistent as well, so they don’t disappear when you reboot.  Some virtual desktop applications provide similar functionality for installed desktop managers (Windows, OS X, BeOS, etc.) but I haven’t looked into them.

This minor-sounding bit of functionality (not even mentioned in the front-page highlights for Peepel) becomes quite powerful when you start using it.  You can name tabs for activities or states of mind (”house hunting”, “news”, “family budgeting”). When you’re working on house hunting and feel bored or stuck and want to distract yourself, you can click over to news and not be bothered by a desktop littered with your uncompleted task.  Then, when you get interrupted while following a thread of a few stories to answer a quick budgeting question, you can abandon the news and not worry about mentally jugging where you left everything.  It is like scratching an itch you didn’t know you had.

Adobe Acrobat has a very sophisticated system for bookmarking.  However its use case is more around the digital equivalent of placing those yellow sticky flags throughout the pages of a book for later reference rather than just keeping your place as you read through the document.  If it was meant for placeholding there would be only one special “place” bookmark, it would automatically store the current place in the doc when you close it or stay in one place for a long time or hit a simple “update placeholder” function key, and it would return to that point when you reopen the document.  Adobe Reader does not offer this functionality, although I believe it should.

I’ve heard Vista has some placeholding technology and plan to try it out soon.  This functionality requires active involvement from the developer of the application as well - it can’t be handled by the OS alone, so I expect mixed results.  Microsoft’s GroupBar research project allowed the user to save working state by taking snapshots of windows, groups, or the desktop restore their state later.  Also, the Microsoft TaskGallery research project is a fancy 3D approach to managing multiple desktop states.  I’m hoping that once users get a taste of placeholding, even in a few apps, it clicks and they become more vocal about requesting it.

I’ve become convinced that one of the most significant attentional technologies that software vendors could incorporate to accommodate interruptions is what I’d call placeholding.  Since “bookmarking” has come to mean pointers to specific entries rather than points anywhere within an entry I prefer the word “placeholding”.

Why do applications that allow you to move around large pieces of content (Microsoft Word and Excel, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox) always assume you want to start at the beginning when opening a document instead of where it was the last time you looked at it?  More than half the time I think I would want it opened to where I left off when I last closed it.  And if I didn’t it’s easy enough to hit ctrl-home to get to the top whereas it is impossible to start at the top and hit a key to get to where you left off.  At a minimum it could be a preference checkbox.  This placeholding includes where the cursor was as well as what state various toggle buttons and selections were at (such as that I was in boldface, red text, the highlighter was yellow, and I had just selected a region). 

There are some technical issues to be worked around here.  Sometimes you don’t want to modify the file - a separate placeholder file, like a browser’s bookmark file could accommodate this issue.  Sometimes there are multiple users on a PC or files get shared - storing user name along with the place like some cookies do could fix that.  I don’t think the technical issues are a stopping point.  We tolerate other actions that don’t guess what we want to do correctly 100% of the time that have a lot less benefit.

In “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work”, a paper by Gloria Mark, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris from the University of California, Irvine, they talk about technology requirements for supporting for fragmented work:

Two decades ago Bannon et al. suggested a set of
requirements for information technology to support
multitasking including providing fast task-switching and the
easy retrieval of mental context. Our work expands these
requirements for multi-tasking. We suggest three main
directions for supporting multi-tasking behavior: 1)
interruptions ideally should match the current working sphere
in order to provide benefits instead of disruptions, 2) one
should be able to easily and seamlessly switch between tasks,
and 3) interrupted tasks should be easily recoverable by
preserving the state of the task when it was interrupted and
by providing cues for reorienting to the task.

It’s this third design criteria that I’m describing here - being able to preserve the state of an application or a set of applications. 

But placeholding doesn’t seem to be high on request lists for new features, so vendors haven’t paid a lot of attention.  In the meantime I’ve gotten into the habit of doing a crude workaround while reviewing large Word documents where I place manual bookmarks within documents I’m reading by typing “[bookmark]” in long documents and saving a new local version.

While there is some minor time benefit to having placeholding, I believe the primary benefit is psychological.  A standard work pattern for information workers is that during a day they become deeply nested in what they are doing.  Multiple browser windows, a spreadsheet or two, a custom app, and a document may all be open to various palaces and the user becomes a juggler keeping all the balls circulating in their mind.  A system crash is the most extreme event that makes one realize how much they were juggling as they attempt to recreate their state upon rebooting.  Keeping these placeholders in memory hinders task-switching and increases the stress the user feels when being interrupted (or anticipates the potential of interruption).  Knowing that places are being held would not eliminate the need to retain mental context, but would reduce it by removing the burden to remember all the documents opened and places within those documents.  I hope that vendors do additional research into how users react to placeholding from an attention management, interruption science, and usability point of view. 

I’m going to play amateur psychologist today.  It’s a hat I usually wear only when trying to rationalize astonishingly poor service in a restaurant or while traveling, but today I’ll apply it to a theory about near-addictive checking of email by information workers.  Now, this theory is not based on any research, cognitive, or process model, but it has some intuitive appeal to me.

I have noticed that I often feel the urge to check email when I feel stuck or bogged down in a long-running project I’m doing or complex piece of work.  I could rack this up to looking for a distraction to clear my head  or avoiding the unpleasantness of feeling stuck.  But I think there’s more to it than that.  I think that our need to accomplish tasks - to get things done - is challenged by the increase in information work with undefined goals and processes and that email is being used like a drug to get a hit of accomplishment when one feels he is spinning his wheels. 

In amateur psychology terms, I’d say that I have a self-image of myself as someone who gets things done.  When I find myself bogged down with something where I find myself staring at the cursor I get annoyed at being stuck.  But to make that annoyance worse it is compounded by cognitive dissonance.  If Psych 101 taught me nothing else (it didn’t), it taught me that the brain does not like to face facts that go against one’s belief system.  For example, if I think I’m a valuable, no-nonsense person that gets things done, why am I now doing nothing and my task it taking longer than it should?  Am I wrong about myself and I need to re-evaluate who I am?  My brain rebels against having to process that, so switching to another realm where I can quickly plow through a handful of small things and cross them off reassures me that I can, indeed, get things done.  The endless stack of emails in the inbox provides a bottomless opportunity to reinforce a self-opinion of oneself as important, decisive, and productive.  Someone needs to hook electrodes up to some college sophomores and measure whether hitting the delete key in rapid succession on a list of emails releases endorphins.

This need is becoming more acute since, as a society, we are moving to majority of work being tacit in nature (undefined; no pre-defined process) as opposed to transformational (creating goods out of raw materials) or transactional (following strict processes).  A McKinsey study from 2006 found that 41% of all work in the US is now tacit in nature.

This is generally a good thing.  I would not want to be stuck in a transactional job where all I do is follow a defined process repeatedly until it’s time to leave.  But with tacit work there is no process defined so the list of tasks needed to complete a unit of work is not defined and is often invented along the way.  This sometimes makes completion of tasks feel like the trials of Sisyphus.  How can I feel a sense of accomplishment at each task when the process is undefined, I don’t know how many tasks there are, they are not tracked, and many tasks prove to be a useless diversion? 

Well, I’m going to stop here for now.  I’m a bit stuck on what else to say at the moment and I have a sudden urge to check email.

According to Madbury (N.H.)-based NFI Research, two-thirds of 228 senior executives and managers who responded to a recent survey say e-mail is the most prominent workplace disruption, followed by crisis of the day (42%), personal interruptions (31%), and changing priorities (30%).

This survey, quoted in a BusinessWeek article on interruptions with the self-explanatory title “Why You Can’t Get Any Work Done“, states that a majority of the senior execs and managers they surveyed thought e-mail is disruptive. How odd that an asynchronous technology (one that is non-real-time and queues messages for delayed response) can be blamed for interrupting people! Phone calls, particularly with no caller ID or answering machine, can certainly interrupt you since telephony is synchronous. But can a technology like e-mail that stores messages until you decide to look at them really be a prominent workplace disruption?

Not literally - you can always turn off “toasts” or bells if they are bothering you. Rather, this is a clear indication that it is the expectations and behavior, not technology, that is the issue. While it’s cathartic to blame “e-mail” (with the unstated assumption it’s the technology), we really have to blame “e-mail volume and response expectations” or “e-mail addiction” or “e-mail etiquette”; all of which are distinctly human issues.

And before anyone draws an analogy to the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” quip, we’re talking about a technology whose main purpose truly is social and benevolent. Therefore outlawing e-mail (or outlawing concealed e-mail - in the form of Blackberrys) wouldn’t solve the problem. After all, when e-mail is outlawed, only outlaws will have e-mail.

People feeling overwhelmed by email cannot solve the problem overnight, but there are avenues to explore to help with the problem:

• Use more appropriate communication vehicles when possible - RSS feeds and virtual workspaces such as discussion groups can get some recurring messages out of email
• Turn off interrupting features of email (toasts and bells on the e-mail system and other devices your forward your e-mail to)
• Set aside an hour one day to learn the attentional capabilities of your email system. There are probably more features than you realize to automatically sort through email, tag it for followup, and follow threads of conversations
• Where culturally appropriate, let senders of inappropriate emails gently know their emails about the fantasy football league that you’re not in or an argument with the whole department cc’d are not needed
• Determine an e-mail checking pattern that works for you. For some this is beginning of day, end of day, and before and after lunch. For others it is whenever they feel they need a break from their task. For still others, it’s catch-as-catch can between meetings and during brief stops in the office

I’d better stop this interruption (caused by reviewing my RSS feeds incidentally) and get back to work … but I have more tips in my posting on Personal Attention Management.