Preparing to do battle...
posted by Nathan Zeldes on January 25, 2007
Back from a trip to Redmond, where I participated in a wonderful workshop dedicated to Infomania. This was organized jointly by Dr. Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli of Haifa University, and yours truly. The intent was to have leading practitioners in this field get together to share and discuss insights, and work together to devise research opportunities and better real world solutions to the problem.
Some two dozen attendees, drawn from academia, industry and the consulting community, all with a proven track record in studying and combating the problem, spent two days together arguing, brainstorming, trying to make sense of the Infoglut. They must have found it as fascinating as I did, because most people weren’t checking email during the sessions…
I could go on, but there’s a good general description out already, here. Now I have to compile the reams of knowledge generated, and I may share the highlights with you in a future post. And no, we haven’t discovered the ultimate solution… not this first time; but we plan to continue to work together until we do.
By the way, does anyone out there have experience with or knowledge of actual implementations of a partial ban on email - like the “No email on Friday” tried at Veritas a while back? If you know of other cases, share here, or get in touch!
Comments (4)
tagged: distractions, infoglut, infomania, information overload, interruptions
Comments
Feb 24 | Bob Hiss said:
Nathan, One email restriction some companies are trying is email postage concept I described in a post to another of your information overload posts. No Email Friday was reviewed by Business Week (12/5/06 by Diane Brady) who interviewed Scott Dockter of PBD Worldwide. They implemented a no-email Friday concept. It then extended to a general reduction of email. He received quite a bit of press including the Today Show in the US, invitations to speak privately to other local companies, etc. His two warnings were that he implemented the program suddenly and now wishes that more change management preparation had gone into it and that he jokingly believes that some of his employees are afraid to send him any email at all.
Feb 25 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Hi Bob,
I heard of Zero Email Fridays at Veritas… will check on PBD. Thanks for the pointer!
May 14 | Jon Whipple said:
Hi Nathan, I haven’t been around, but was catching up on your posts. This one jumped out at me and I wanted to let you know there’s a branch library in our sytstem who have adopted a no email time period for two hours each day, don’t know results yet because it just started and my Virtual Library unit is about to measure or email activity starting tomorrow and then we’ll be trying an email ban period as well.
The evidence will be anecdotal, but maybe useful as some kind of beginning benchmark.
More soon, I’m sure as this unfolds and I continue to read-up.
May 14 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Hey Jon, this is very interesting. Do share the outcome!