Subscribe to RSS Add to Technorati Faves Digg This Page Send to Stumble Upon Bookmark on Delicious

“infoglut” Tag

06/14/2008: “Quiet Time” and “No Email Day” pilot data is in!

Since the previous post in October there has been much interest in our two pilots aiming to reduce information overload; and I’ve responded to all of them with the quintessential engineering attitude of “we’ll have to wait until the data...

Comments closed.
Tagged: , , , , , , ,

10/01/2007: “Quiet Time” on track – “No Email Day” is next!

A month ago I reported the http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/08/quiettimepilothaslaunched.php our attempt to push back on the problem of incessant distractions by assigning Tuesday mornings to uninterrupted work in full “offline” mode. We are watching the pilot closely, and although our next formal...

Comments (11)
Tagged: , , , , , , ,

09/04/2007: Organize your work like the real scheduling experts! (Part I)

I’ve been especially busy recently, juggling a number of disparate projects and trying to keep them all moving forward. My organizational system has evolved over the years into a priority-based set of lists. The medium has also varied over the...

No comments yet--start the conversation »
Tagged: , , , , ,

08/31/2007: “Quiet Time” pilot has launched!

Our faithful readers will recall my promise to share our progress on piloting “Next Generation solutions” to the Information Overload problem, ones that go beyond training people to adopt voluntary behavior change. Well – the first pilot is underway! One...

Comments (2)
Tagged: , , , , , ,

08/25/2007: Personal coping strategies II

OK, here is another strategy I’ve observed people use to cope with email overload: write very short messages in all-caps or all-lowercase. I mean, really short. A word. A sentence. Rarely, a very short paragraph. Interestingly, I’ve observed this primarily...

Comments (8)
Tagged: , , ,

08/14/2007: Infomania paper published – come and get it!

In my previous posts I’ve hinted often at the body of research that we’ve used to understand the impact of the Information Overload problem. We summarized all this research as a White Paper that makes a strong case for taking...

Comments (3)
Tagged: , , , , ,

07/26/2007: The syndication barrier

We are starting to look at syndicating MSRs. That’s Monthly Status Reports, and we got lots of them cluttering our mail, some useful, some… well… What we envision is a setup where these pesky reports get published as XML feeds...

Comments (14)
Tagged: , , , , ,

07/10/2007: Candy bar overload?

The other day I ran, once again, into the famous estimation that “one weekday edition of today’s New York Times contains more information than the average person in 17th-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime”. This...

Comments (3)
Tagged: , ,

06/29/2007: A look back…

Recently my co-blogger David and I have been interviewed in CIO magazine about our Infomania solution project. You never know where such a thing may lead… years ago I was similarly interviewed by Fast Company magazine, and to my amazement...

No comments yet--start the conversation »
Tagged: , , , , ,

06/26/2007: Personal coping strategies I

It is interesting how people cope with Email Overload. We are a resilient species, and as pressures evolve, we evolve coping strategies, which vary from person to person. Over time you are bound to sight such strategies, reflected in the...

Comments (2)
Tagged: , , , , ,

04/18/2007: Information Overload TNG: our Next Generation solution set

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...

Comments (5)
Tagged: , , , , ,

03/31/2007: Children of the Net

A recurrent Sci Fi theme is that of the upgraded children. From classic oldies like Clarke’s Childhood’s End or Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, to the modern Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear, there is the almost medieval horror of a sudden...

Comments (3)
Tagged: , , , , ,

03/13/2007: An insight from William Gibson

Just finished reading William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” (and I highly recommend it, if you’re into Gibson). Anyway, I noticed a sentence in this book that goes “Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a...

Comments (8)
Tagged: , , ,

02/19/2007: Nathan’s favorite e-mail tip…

There is a tradition that articles about email overload should end with a list of coping tips. In fact, when Fast Company wrote about my activity six years ago they concluded the article with a sidebar titled “The 10 Commandments...

No comments yet--start the conversation »
Tagged: , , ,

01/25/2007: Preparing to do battle...

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...

Comments (4)
Tagged: , , , ,

01/02/2007: Information Overload VII: Distractions and Interruptions

Happy new year, folks! Infomania consists of Messaging Overload and Distractions. So far I’ve discussed only the former in these posts; time to look at the latter, because the productivity damage caused by Distractions and Interruptions may be less obvious...

Comments (12)
Tagged: , , , ,

12/17/2006: Think of the children

An engineer recently told me he bought the famous Harry Potter book in e-book format in order to be able to read it to his kid at bedtime while “doing email” at the same time. No, this is not a...

Comments (7)
Tagged: , , , , ,

11/21/2006: Information Overload VI: JIT Coaching Redux

Last week I shared with you the Intel Email Effectiveness Coach, a tool for Just in Time coaching of ill-behaved senders. Today I share an interesting derivative of this tool: eMailAdvantage Assistant. This was produced by BP’s Digital Learning group,...

Comments (3)
Tagged: , , , , ,

11/14/2006: Information Overload V: A JIT Coaching solution

A controversial question: You want to stop harmful behaviors like poor email etiquette in the organization. Can you educate your users to do what’s good for them? There are two views: If you educate them, they will do the right...

Comments (5)
Tagged: , , , , ,

11/01/2006: Victorian digression: 19th century Infomania

I’m off to a hectic two week business trip to the USA, so expect short posts for a while (in fact I’m writing this one above the Atlantic, having lost hope of a decent sleep). Let me share with you...

No comments yet--start the conversation »
Tagged: , , ,

10/27/2006: Information Overload IV: There really is another way

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...

Comments (4)
Tagged: , , ,

10/16/2006: Information Overload III: First Generation solutions

So, in 1995 we were already deep in email overload. Having just transitioned into IT as Computing Productivity manager for our Israel site, I decided to have a go at it. For starters, I went on a data collecting binge,...

Comments (3)
Tagged: , , ,

10/12/2006: Information Overload II: The Dark Side

Back in 1994, Intel introduced its first Windows-based e-mail system to replace the previous text-only, mainframe-based system. Almost immediately, our smart employees realized that with this tool you could easily send mail to huge distribution lists, which they proceeded to...

Comments (7)
Tagged: , , , , , ,

10/09/2006: Information Overload

What do you write about when posting to an exciting new blog for the first time? If you’re me, it’s a no-brainer: I will, today and often, write on my favorite enemy of over a decade, Information Overload. By “write”...

Comments (16)
Tagged: , , , , ,