A happy Jewish new year to one and all! May the next year be a wonderful
one for you, your families, and all good people around us. The past year was, by any account,
interesting but tough; may the next one be interesting and easy.
Speaking of interesting, I
get to meet more interesting and smart people all the time. In my core area of Information Overload,
I actually had the pleasure of running recently into a VP at a large company who was addressing the
problem proactively – and, among other things, he’d done what I’d advocated some years ago: he had
the “Reply to All” button removed from the Outlook interface for his entire group, with good
results. This idea is quite simple, yet highly beneficial: the few seconds it adds to the
process of replying to all – by forcing one to cut and paste the addresses – are all it takes to
make the sender think and realize they should be more selective. Yet few organizations have the
courage to do this; so it made my day to witness it.
Cheers,
In this issue News:New year, New product. Reflection: Adapting to do email on a small screen. From the Toolbox:
TimeBridge.What's New New year, New product
I said already – a new year! Surely that’s new enough?
Seriously, I’m
also about to launch a new product offering, a lecture optimized for management staffs that delivers
the knowledge and insights they need to be able to define a strategy on Information Overload in
their company. In a sense, it distills my 15 years of experience and thinking in this domain into
one rich session of practical know-how. Tried it out at a client and it looks good – pass the word
around!
Observations, reflections and opinions Adapting to do email on a small screen Here is an insight from a manager at a
client company of mine: giving people Blackberries with access to Email may add responsiveness
(whether this is good or bad is a separate issue), but it tends to reduce the
quality of mail in the company. This is because on a small device, opening attachments is a big
hassle, so people just don’t; nor do they scroll through the entire message. Instead, they tend to
glance at the few lines that fit in a tiny screenful or two, and they act on that – with the
observed result that replies are often totally not to the point, in a manner indicating that the
sender never read the original mail properly.
I do think that this is a real issue, but also
that it could be addressed if people paid attention to the inherent limitations of mobile devices.
As an example, at Intel I instituted years ago the recommendation, which we trained people to
accept, that the “Location” field of a teleconference meeting request should be written backwards:
Pass-code, Bridge #, Dialup number. This was so if the line got truncated on a mobile screen, you’d
still see the important parts (the pass-code is meeting-specific; bridges tended to stay the same;
and the long dialup number was uniform across the corporation so we knew it by heart anyway). Point
is, we designed the usage around the small screen, rather than pretend that it was the same as the
standard PC display. Of course the kids who use mobile phones and SMS all day know this; they have a
whole new language of abbreviations and emoticons adapted to the small form factor. If we want to
use SFF devices for corporate mail, we need to go down a similar path. From the toolbox
TimeBridge Here is a tool I really admire, because it solves a ubiquitous
problem is a very sensible manner. This is
TimeBridge, and it addresses the all too common situation where you need to find a meeting
time that a bunch of busy people in different locations are all available at. My traditional
way of doing this was to email them all a list of time slots and have each mark each slot as “No way
/ OK / Best”, then tally the results and find the best time. Which is laborious and annoying to say
the least, but at least it works.
TimeBridge does the very same thing – automatically (Hey,
great minds think alike :-) You give it the attendees’ emails, the times you are OK with, and
forget it. TimeBridge will mail the folks, direct them to a web page where they can vote, find the
best time (or inform you if you need to add flexibility), and set the meeting on everyone’s
calendars. Simple, fast, effective – and free, in the basic version (the advanced version does a lot
more, of course).
Snapshots of Ingenuity How can a blind
person match the colors of their clothes? Enter the Bright-F concept design by Lifeng Yu, a
small gadget that scans the cloth and speaks out its color. As ingenious as it is useful! [Read
more].
The Monthly Factoid What is the Bat Capital of the World?
It is Austin,
Texas. It’s home to a colony of 1.5 Million bats that all roost under a single bridge, and fly out
each nightfall to hunt and consume some 15 tons of insects. A magnificent aerobatic display... been
there, seen it.
A happy Jewish new year to one and all! May the next year be a wonderful
one for you, your families, and all good people around us. The past year was, by any account,
interesting but tough; may the next one be interesting and easy.
