This month I got my ducks in a row
(a lovely expression, that!) as far as my lecture
offerings are involved: I now have three lectures ready to
deliver on demand, with proper brochures (in Hebrew, for the
time being) that you can see here.
Feedback welcome!
Meanwhile the Knowledge Worker
effectiveness thrust of my activity is increasing its demand
on my time – a good thing to be sure. I’m trying to balance
the convenience of applying what I’ve done in my past life
with the exciting challenge of morphing it to be even better
based on lessons from that period. Interesting outcomes!
Cheers,
In this issue News:Information
Overload Awareness Day Reflection: The multitasking
myth From the
Toolbox:
AwayFindWhat's New Information Overload Awareness
Day Aug. 12 will be
Information Overload Awareness Day. Organized by New York analyst firm Basex, it
will be a day of interaction, knowledge sharing, and learning
about the problem of Information Overload. The intent is to
raise awareness to the IO problem, and to provide a venue for
a virtual conference where speakers from corporate, vendor,
consulting and media circles will cover various aspects of
this global scourge.
Since raising awareness is one
component of the mission of the Information Overload Research
Group (IORG),
our group will be sponsoring this event, and yours truly will
be one of the speakers.
Observations, reflections and
opinions The multitasking myth People love
excuses to ignore a problem, and so when the matter of
interruptions at work comes up they often tell me not to
worry, the next generation is arriving in the workplace and
they are oh-so-able to handle this problem because they are
adept at Multitasking. Problem solved!
The
reality, actually, is that no one can really multitask,
because the human brain is not constructed to do so. The most
convincing proof comes from fMRI brain scans; you can see the
neurons doing a task turn off when another task is thrown in.
Indirect data comes from behavioral research, including the
sad observation that driving and talking on a hands-free
cellphone setup raises your accident risk to that which you
face when legally drunk. The ability to multitask is,
therefore, a myth.
This doesn’t mean that younger
people are identical to their elders; they are clearly more
comfortable using social networking tools and many are more
flexible in adopting new technology. But the observation that
a teenager can hold five IM conversations at once does not
mean they will be able to work on five product designs at
once, or to make five high quality management decisions at
once. Work is not the same as kid stuff.
Once you
realize that the underlying brain hardware is the same, it’s
clearly better to focus on training the older generation to
adopt the new tools and to reduce the insane demands of an
overloaded, frenzied work style for everybody. Assuming the
next round of hires will not have a problem with this
constantly interrupted work style is simply sticking your head
in the sand... From the toolbox AwayFind One of the key messages
in any email effectiveness training is “Don’t be checking
email all the time; do it in 1-2 concentrated time slots per
day”. And although this makes perfect sense from a
productivity standpoint, there are many who resist because of
the fear that they might miss a time-critical, important
message that does require immediate response.
Enter
AwayFind, an ingenious little tool that can free you
from Inbox addiction while ensuring you won’t miss that rare
critical email. Once you sign up, you can put in your sig (or
out-of-office message) a line like “I only check email
twice a day; if you need to reach me urgently,
http://awayfind.com/myname.” The URL provides a short form
that the sender can fill with a message that will get routed
to your cellphone or other destination. There’s more, but the
key point is this: most message senders will await your “Inbox
time”, but the few that really need to can draw your attention
instantly via this bypass.
Snapshots of
Ingenuity Let me introduce to you the most
wonderful Geek-worthy comic out there: xkcd, by Randall
Munroe. Self-styled “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and
language”, this stick figure comic defies description except
to say that if you’re a geek, you will be thoroughly amazed by
the artist’s eclectic subject matter, humor and piercing mind.
Take
a look!
The Monthly Factoid The fun word
Factoid, which you can see I like a lot, has the
unfortunate aspect of being quite ambiguous: it can mean
“unverified, incorrect, or fabricated statement asserted as a
fact”, and it is also used to mean “A brief, somewhat
interesting fact”. Rest assured that here I will only use it
in the second meaning...
The lesson: Language is
a malleable, fluid, and wonderfully imprecise
thing!
This month I got my ducks in a row
(a lovely expression, that!) as far as my lecture
offerings are involved: I now have three lectures ready to
deliver on demand, with proper brochures (in Hebrew, for the
time being) that you can see 
