Information Overload TNG: our Next Generation solution set
posted by Nathan Zeldes on April 18, 2007
A while back I wrote about our “First Generation” solutions to Infomania: those based on training people to adopt voluntary behavior change. And I told you that our experience is that their effect always lasts a year or two and then diminishes as people come and go and memories fade; then you re-launch the training to gain another year, and so on… Admittedly these programs are inexpensive to run, so this is acceptable; still, last year I finally got tired of this repetition and decided to try and devise something completely different – solutions that would be less voluntary and more aggressive in stopping the barrage of email and interruptions. These are now being developed for deployment later this year.
The first step in getting anything done at Intel is to be sure you have your data straight; and in fact I and some coworkers spent many months interfacing with researchers and practitioners in other companies to get a handle on the Infomania problem and collect proof of its impact (this interaction had also led to the recent workshop we held in Redmond!) We then put together a definite business case showing the cost of the problem to Intel; this was impressive indeed, and paved the way to management approval for trying more radical solutions. To cut a long story short (and in a large corporation, any story can get fairly long) we now have approval to try a cluster of solutions, including (among others):
- A client-side add-on we’re getting ready to develop, which is inspired by our good ol’ Intel Email Effectiveness Coach. Like its predecessor, this will look at messages being sent, and intervene if they violate any of a dozen etiquette rules. But unlike the IEEC, this version will go beyond advice (as in “Have you notice your message has no subject line”?); it will also coerce, as in “If you really mean to reply to all these people, please check the boxes next to each name you truly need”. It will also encourage effective email formatting and enable people to shut down email and IM notification for specified durations when they need some quiet time.
- Experimentation with “Quiet Time” methodology to mitigate 24x7 Email Addiction: we plan a set of Proof of Concept evaluations (POCs) that will target the use of email as a non-stop synchronous tool, which it was never designed to be. We plan to try batching email on the server and delivering it once an hour to the clients; we plan to try stopping delivery for 3 hours at a stretch a few times a week; we plan to try the “No (Internal) Email Day” concept. All these are serious deviations from the status quo, and will be tried on volunteer teams with careful monitoring of the impact. The experience in other companies is that these ideas can improve knowledge worker productivity and wellbeing – if done right. We need to find out how this can be made to happen.
- Development of an enterprise syndication ecosystem, to move “blast” emails like status reports and org announcements from “push” email to a subscription model using RSS.
- Embedding all these changes in an overall behavior change education campaign.
Together, these actions form an aggressive multi-pronged attack on all aspects of Infomania. I’ll discuss these in more detail in coming posts, solicit your input and report progress.
Stay tuned!
Comments (5)
tagged: distractions, email, infoglut, infomania, information overload, interruptions
Comments
Apr 18 | Josh Bancroft said:
Here’s the email overload strategy I’m currently employing:
Email is a River.
You stand in the middle of the river, watching stuff float by, grabbing the important looking stuff, but a lot of it gets by you. That’s OK - no one in their right mind would try to stop every drop of a flowing river from getting by.
Besides, if it’s important, they’ll email again, or contact me through some other means (IM, phone, Twitter, blog comment, whatever), right? ;-)
Credit for the original idea goes to Dave Winer and his “River of News” theory.
Apr 18 | Nathan Zeldes said:
You would, Josh :-)
Actually I’d argue that this river method is fine for surfing, reading RSS, even for non-work email. But email in a workplace should be a focused tool; ideally no message should be sent to you unless it’s of real value, and you should then be reading every one. The reality is that half the messages are of little or no use, and many users still feel compelled to read it all, to everyone’s detriment…
Apr 18 | Josh Bancroft said:
It’s the difference you note between “should” and “reality” that drove me to my “Email is a River” approach in the first place. ;-)
Apr 19 | Roger Saur said:
These are interesting concepts for harnessing the email overload in a big corporation. We are having very similiar issues, but due to the fast paced nature of our business (Finance) it is very difficult to educate users effectively on email usage or introduce radically different delivery methodogies (such as RSS feeds). We have seen email becoming the center of corporate communication, acting as a knowledge share, document repository and workflow tool. Now, for all of these use cases we do have technology in place to provide this functionality, but they all have a major flaw: They don’t integrate well (yet) into the email client, which is the UI that a users spend most of their day in. We have initated a project that will integrate a piece of software into the email UI to automatically prioritize emails, instant messages and voice mails, and also allows to “tune out” for specified period of time. Very similiar concept to your “quiet time” with the difference that we handle this at the client.
Apr 19 | Heath Buckmaster said:
The problem for me is even more basic that all the data that is thrown at us daily from news sources, RSS readers, television, radio, etc.
My overload comes from having to remember all of the sources of data that I even go to and have accounts on. I mean, I have about 483 passwords to remember across 481 systems. Once I remember my password to the systems, I can log in and then I’m inundated with information.
I’m a member of Harris Interactive* and often get their surveys - one of the demographic questions they often ask is whether I think it’s good to have information available, or whether I think we have information overload. In general, I always pick that I’d rather have the information available, but the problem with that is, is there taxonomy to go with it that helps me filter out the junk and get to what I want.
Internally, in our forums environments, we tend to start out with a flat structure and build the taxonomy as usage increases. This is so hard for a person like to me to handle. I need structure. I need a hierarchy. I need a way to start from the top and filter my way down to the information that I need…otherwise, I’ll stop accessing those 480+ sites, and pick two that give me the most information the majority of the time…but then I miss out on possible great stuff out there.
I have a headache.