Information Overload IV: There really is another way

posted by Nathan Zeldes on October 27, 2006

A fascinating aspect of the Info Overload is the submissive attitude of many of its victims. I never quite figured this one out. I mean, if someone came into your cubicle every day at noon and punched you in the nose, you’d no doubt do something about it soon enough, wouldn’t you? Yet people are clobbering their coworkers’ productivity and quality of life by sending them totally unnecessary messages – 30% of all messages, our data show – day after day, and people just accept it meekly. The general attitude is that this is just part of life, or the price of staying connected, or whatever, and there’s nothing they can do about it except suffer and plod on.

Yet they can do something about it, if only they’d get out of their apathetic attitude and realize that email overload is well within their control. That avalanche of messages is not created by a cosmic force beyond our ken; each and every message you receive is sent by a human being, whose name is very visible at the top of the header; and if the message is harmful to you, then that human had done you harm, either through negligence, or (if the sender knows you don’t need the message) in an act of evil. Just because clicking Send is so easy doesn’t make it morally permissible when it hurts others. The obvious response would be to get back to the sender, politely of course, and let them know you’ve been harmed – then tell them not to send you similar messages in the future.

Unfortunately, few view it this way. There is the ever-lurking fear to offend, fear that in future you’ll be left out of the know; there is laziness – coaching the sender requires thought and time, after all; and there is the inability to even think about it that is a characteristic of the Infomania state. I am reminded of this charming passage from “Winnie the Pooh”:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

A major problem in any effort to stamp out Email Overload has always been to educate users that they can fight back, and that it should be the organizational expectation that they do so. This expectation goes both ways:

• The sender is expected not to send any email that is harmful (i.e. useless) to any of its recipients.
• The recipient is responsible not to receive any unnecessary emails.

Neither idea is trivial. The first implies, for example, that if you send to a predefined distribution list, you should verify that not even one of its members can do without the message, and if one can, you are responsible to remove them. The second means that if a recipient has in their inbox a message they don’t need, and they don’t take action to ensure it won’t happen again (get off the dist list, educate the sender, etc), then that recipient is delinquent; at least in a commercial enterprise they are, since an employee has no right to waste their paid work time.

So does Intel subscribe to these concepts? Well, nobody ever got fired from Intel for sending too much email (if you heard of any company that did this, speak up; I doubt one exists). But we did incorporate these expectations into our training and education programs that I discussed in the previous installment of this series, and hopefully many people got the message. Maybe they stopped bumping long enough to understand: you can do something about Email Oveload.

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tagged: email, infoglut, infomania, information overload