Just the message please

I recently noticed not one, not two, but 11 disclaimers at the bottom of an extensive e-mail exchange that occurred over a period of several days.

I noticed that disclaimers first started appearing on some e-mail messages from lawyers a few years back, but more recently, accountants, bankers, financial advisers, and certain types of consultants have also gotten into the act.

Most disclaimers ostensibly serve three functions, although their actual efficacy is subject to question (and would be the topic of an entirely different article):
1.) Notify the recipient that the e-mail message may contain “information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law.”
2.) Tell the recipient NOT to read the e-mail if he is not the intended recipient (presumably, telling the recipient not to read it won’t make him more curious, especially when the disclaimer is at the very end of the message and he’s presumably already read it).
3.) Ask the recipient to destroy the communication if he’s not the intended recipient and, additionally, to notify the sender thusly.

There’s a problem inherent in all of these disclaimers, namely, their position relative to the text of the e-mail message.

Our research on Information Overload has taught me that knowledge workers frequently don’t make it past the middle of the second paragraph of a message. The likelihood of someone making it all the way down to the disclaimer and then reading it is about as likely as someone reading an end-user license agreement (EULA) for a piece of software. (The software companies know that it is very unlikely that a EULA will be read; years ago, PC Pitstop, an antispyware maker, put a note in its own EULA promising $1,000 to the first person who sent an e-mail to a specific e-mail address. It took four months and several thousand downloads before that e-mail arrived and the sender received the $1,000 for his trouble.)

Despite all of this, I really didn’t give much thought to the disclaimer problem until I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (Warning: If the Email You Just Read Isn’t for You, Don’t Read It”) focusing on it. (The premise of the piece was that disclaimers are routinely ignored and held by many to be silly.)

What was really telling were some of the comments from readers. There was clear agreement that the disclaimers were, well, just silly.

Garrett Mcdaniel wrote that, at a previous employment, he added sentences including “Failure to do so will result in the unintended recipient’s immediate extradition to Guantanamo from which they will never be seen or heard from again” or “Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventive dentifrice when used in a conscientiously applied program….” Neither was ever noticed by a recipient.

Finally, Peter Eggert included a disclaimer on his own comment:
“This comment is the property of Peter and is in no way a representation of his lawyer, dog, parents, the Sun, Jerry Seinfeld, Uranus, or Major League Baseball. Any attempts to recreate this comment shall be deemed ineligible under the SEC Act of 1933, Miranda v. Arizona, and “Finders Keepers”.”

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. ~Tommy Smothers

In what had an eerie resemblance to a No Email Friday but which occurred for very different reasons, portions of the Internet went dark last week.

On January 18, major Web sites including Wikipedia and Reddit were closed to business. Google did not shut down but covered up its logo with a large black bar, making it look as if the site had been censored.

These were all part of a grassroots effort to protest anti-piracy legislation, namely the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect I.P. Act (PIPA), which had been working their way through Congress.

This is the first time in history that major Web sites banded together in protest and it was largely led by information providers (i.e. Wikipedia and Google), which get more traffic than other sites.

After the protest, dozens of members of Congress as well as the White House dropped their support of the bills and the sponsors of SOPA and PIPA are contemplating considerable changes to the bills.

While some of the Internet sites went a bit overboard with scare tactics about SOPA and PIPA, ultimately the power of the people – and information providers – prevailed. The people spoke and the government listened and made an abrupt about face.

And regardless of any future legislation that may address anti-piracy, January 18, 2012 was a notable day in information history.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Cheers!

It’s hard to believe, but the New Year is almost upon us.  In the interest of not contributing further to your overload, dear reader, I’ll keep my resolutions brief.

E-mail – as demonstrated by the amount of coverage that the Atos e-mail ban received in recent weeks – is still a hot topic, so let’s try to fix it for 2012.

First, when preparing an e-mail message for the consumption of others, write it with the recipient in mind and please take a moment and read it for comprehension before clicking on Send.

Second, when replying to an e-mail, please read the entire message you are replying to.  It’s amazing how many people reply asking a question about what the writer very clearly covered in paragraph seven of the original e-mail.

Third, on the topic of even having a paragraph seven in an e-mail message, keep e-mail messages short and on topic.  Cramming three or four (or 10 or 20) topics and questions into one e-mail simply means that most of them will be ignored and unread.

I can’t promise this will remedy all of the ills of the world but following these three easy steps will Lower the Overload in 2012.

Happy Holidays! Happy New Year! Prosit Neujahr!

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Last week, Atos, a French IT company, announced a ban on internal e-mail.  Atos’ management justified the action as a way to stop wasteful messaging.  It says that staffers get an average of 200 e-mail messages per day (the average, according to our calculations, 93), and that most are not “critical.”

Atos wants to move conversations that would take place in e-mail to tools such as Microsoft Office Communicator instant messaging and face-to-face discussions.  Aside from the fact that managers there should read my “What Works Better When?” treatise, I have to wonder how it was determined that “most” of the e-mail exchanges were not necessary.

It’s quite true that e-mail can be wasteful, and furthermore I’m willing to bet that Atos didn’t even begin to calculate the cost of “unnecessary” interruptions, which would magnify the presumed cost of wasteful e-mail exchanges five fold in many cases.

What does trouble me to some extent is the amount of press that Atos’ action has gotten.  While Atos’ management may have indeed given some though to the problem, other managers may simply read the headlines (“Huge Company Bans Internal E-mail” was a popular one) and decide to pull the plug.

Does anyone remember No E-mail Wednesdays?  They were immediately followed by E-mail Tsunami Thursdays.

E-mail has become the prime means of moving information both within an enterprise and beyond its borders.  Is it the ideal means?  No, of course not.  But to paraphrase Sir Winston, e-mail is the worst form of messaging except for all the others that have been tried.

Instant messaging and social networks all have their place, but there are still many types of messages, ranging from out-of-office communications to thoughts that require a longer explanation, where e-mail is still the best medium.

Now, if we could all exercise a bit of control when it comes to the number of recipients…

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Is there a reply in there somewhere?

How many times do you send an e-mail message to someone and not get a reply?  Fairly often, I’d wager.

But how do you know and keep track of times when you don’t get a reply?

Sometimes I think back, oh, I sent an e-mail and so-and-so doesn’t seem to have replied.  When did I send it?  What was the subject?  Did I miss the reply?

When this happens, I first have to search for the e-mail that I had originally sent.  Sometimes that takes just a second, sometimes it takes a while.  Then I have to determine whether the question or issue is still important and, if so, what the next course of action might be.

I could send another e-mail but that could go unnoticed as well.  I don’t know if the recipient saw the first e-mail or even if it actually arrived (e-mail delivery is not infallible).

I can then resend it, forward it, or forward the e-mail to someone else who may be able to help me.  In some cases, it might make far more sense to switch communications channels altogether and make a phone call or send an instant message (especially internally).

Of course, this is all predicated on my being able to recall that a.) I had sent the e-mail and b.) that no reply had been forthcoming.  Much e-mail goes unreplied to and some of it is actually important.

In the meantime, some important issues go overlooked and much time is wasted.  I probably become aware of at least one unanswered e-mail each day and figuring out what the status of that message is, as well what actions are required can take anywhere from five to 15 minutes.  If every knowledge worker in the U.S. dealt with this issue on a daily basis, we would find we lose 12.576  million hours on a given day, at a cost of $264 million (this is based on 78.6 million knowledge workers and 10 minutes or 16% of one hour lost).

Of course, what could be even more costly are the ramifications of an e-mail message which has perhaps not been acted upon or read or replied to.  It’s impossible to calculate these costs but, in some cases, they can be significant, resulting in a loss of business, missed opportunity, or simply confusion and frustration for the knowledge worker who does not know if the e-mail was ever received and acted upon.

While there are several third-party Microsoft Outlook plug-ins and tools that address this issue, what we really need is an option in the out-of-the-box e-mail client (IBM, Microsoft are you listening?) that allows me to set a time period for receiving replies to flagged e-mail so that, when no reply is forthcoming within this timeframe, the e-mail client alerts me.  Sounds like an easy fix to me.

UPDATE – Since this Commentary was published on Tuesday, a reader pointed out that he uses the follow-up feature in Microsoft Outlook (there is a similar feature in Lotus Notes, which is what I use). The problem is that this requires the sender of the e-mail to set up the follow-up flag when sending (although it can also be set at a later point in time), and the feature serves only as a reminder for further action since it does not know whether the recipient has or has not replied to the e-mail.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Lower the Overload, send less e-mail

Information Overload Awareness Day (IOAD) continued the dialog I sought to begin three years ago with the first IOAD.

To be candid, for the past few months, I’ve been a bit overloaded as have my colleagues at Basex and we were considering on moving IOAD to December.

We were therefore surprised a few weeks ago when we noticed articles announcing that Information Overload Awareness Day 2011 would be on October 20 once again.  A phone conversation I had with Marsha Egan, who runs the aptly named InBoxDetox.com and has supported IOAD all three years, was enlightening to say the least.  It’s ironic, Marsha pointed out, that we are so overloaded that we couldn’t even turn off IOAD.

I had created IOAD but by year three, it had taken on a life of its own.

To “celebrate” IOAD, I asked knowledge workers around the world to send 10% fewer e-mail messages each day.  E-mail by itself is just one manifestation of Information Overload but it may well be the poster child.  I was pleased to see countless bloggers and journalists pick up the call this year and ask their readers to Lower the Overload by sending fewer electronic missives.

I’ve done a lot of speaking about Information Overload in the past few months and I just returned from Scottsdale, Arizona, where I spoke at a meeting of the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection.  The meeting specifically addressed Cybersecurity Through A Behavioral Lens and I was asked to speak about Information Overload.

It was a gratifying talk in part because the Q&A that followed almost didn’t end (it eventually had to end because many of the participants had flown out that same day and were still on east coast time and my keynote followed the dinner hour) and in part because the attendees were some of the leading thinkers in the field.  As it turned out, the behavioral observations my colleagues and I were making about Information Overload had great applicability to cybersecurity issues and the questions and discussion largely centered on building a bridge between the two disciplines.

It turns out that even cybersecurity experts and academicians in this field are not immune to the problems of Information Overload and this group in particular related to the story told to me by Col. Peter Marksteiner of the rogue e-mail that was forwarded and forwarded until it brought down the e-mail servers at Maxwell Air Force Base – during a cybersecurity event there in June 2008.

If you haven’t yet started to Lower the Overload, you can still take stock of your own information habits and take the first step by sending fewer e-mail messages to fewer recipients.  If we all do this, it will make a difference.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Where do I even start...

Today is the third annual Information Overload Awareness Day (some media outlets have shortened this to Information Overload Day, which in my view gives it an entirely different spin).

To “celebrate,”  we at Basex invite each and every one of you to Lower the Overload starting now.

Some may ask, why do we need an Information Overload Awareness Day?  We need it because we don’t have days that are free from the problem.  Our research shows that only 5% of the knowledge workers’ day is available for thought and reflection.  The largest single block of time in the average day (25%) is spent dealing with Information Overload-related issues, such as interruptions, excessive e-mails, and failed searches.

We need Information Overload Awareness Day because the problem is getting worse, not better.  For us to even begin to regain our lost productivity, scattered focus, and decimated work/life balance, the first thing that must happen is for every one of us to acknowledge the problem, and then take action.

We need Information Overload Awareness Day because Information Overload is dulling our senses and limiting our ability to absorb more in-depth and complex thoughts and content.

Last year, we asked all knowledge workers to attempt to send 10% fewer e-mail messages.  This year, we ask knowledge workers to reaffirm that pledge.  If you have lapsed, please try again. If you’ve succeeded, try to commit to further reducing the quantity of e-mail you send.

We’ve made great progress in raising awareness of Information Overload’s impact.  My book Overload!: How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization was published a few months ago.  It outlines the problem of Information Overload and shows us how we all can make a difference through our individual actions.

We’ve also expanded the conversation to include a variety of great thinkers and writers.  In June, in an online roundtable sponsored by the Information Overload Research Group, we brought together Dave Crenshaw (The Myth of Multitasking), Daniel Forrester (Consider), Maggie Jackson (Distracted), and William Powers (Hamlet’s BlackBerry).

Just recently, I spoke at Google’s headquarters (talk about being inside the lion’s den) to Google employees about the problem (yes, they have it there too) and I’ve been speaking at conferences and meetings almost on a weekly basis (next Tuesday, I’ll be in Philadelphia speaking at a Wharton event).

Organizations that include Google, the Churchill Club, Dow Jones, and Berkeley University invited me to speak and join in Information Overload-focused events that have helped spread the word and raise awareness like never before.

Information Overload cost theU.S.economy $997 billion in 2010 – and that figure continues to grow as we approach 2012.

Help Lower the Overload (our slogan for Information Overload Awareness Day) on Thursday and beyond. Remember, even without your knowing it, your actions impact others so do what you can. Remember, we are all in this together.

People frequently ask me if there is an easy fix for Information Overload, a corporate pill as it were.  While such a thing does not exist, I do know that simply raising awareness of the problem and its ramifications does help begin to reduce the amount of overload we face.  In addition, each of us can and should assume a bit of personal responsibility for the problem and take the appropriate steps to mitigate it.

I have.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Ready, set, ...

On Thursday October 20, knowledge workers around the world will mark the third annual Information Overload Awareness Day.  The theme is “Lower the Overload.”  The holiday/observance is our attempt to raise awareness of the crippling burden that Information Overload places on all of us.  Thanks to the vast amount of information that we all face on a daily basis, individual knowledge workers, teams, and entire organizations suffer diminished productivity and the loss of the ability to make sound decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks.

Information Overload Awareness Day is an opportunity for knowledge workers and organizations to take stock of the impact that this serious problem is having on their productivity and work life balance, not to mention on their organizations’ bottom line.

One thing we have discovered as we have researched Information Overload is how easy it is to take steps to lessen its impact by simply raising awareness of the problem.  Information Overload Awareness Day is in part a day to step back and contemplate how our individual actions contribute to the problem.

On Thursday, we will ask everyone to start by sending 10% fewer e-mail messages (this includes copying fewer people on the e-mail you do send).

Two simple statistics from my book Overload! how Too Much Information Is Hazadous To Your Organization explain why this is important:

- Reading and processing just 100 e-mail messages can occupy over half of a worker’s day.

- For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an e-mail, eight hours are lost.

In addition, look at how you use and share information and you may see opportunities to make processes more efficient as well as take action to improve your own information habits, such as in the area of search.

Information Overload cost the U.S.economy $997 billion in 2010 – and that figure will increase for 2011.

Help Lower the Overload (our slogan for Information Overload Awareness Day) on Thursday and beyond.   Remember, even without your knowing it, your actions impact others so do what you can.  Remember, we are all in this together.

Yes or no....

Ten years ago, I first wrote what I now refer to as “What Works Better When” a look at the practical and social implications of when one should use the telephone, instant messaging and, more recently, such tools as text messaging and social software.

When I first wrote this, we had three choices, namely the telephone, instant messaging, and in person contact.

I didn’t anticipate how many choices there would be ten years later – and the number of choices brings in a new question, the personal preference of the recipient.

Without rehashing the entire piece, which I updated in my new book, Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization, I’ve observed some trends in how people use these various tools that make this revisit necessary.

I got to this point when several of my phone calls were criticized for, well, being phone calls.  “It’s better to text me” I was chided by a friend after calling to say I wanted to grab a coffee with him while I was in his neighborhood.  “I don’t always look to see who’s calling but I almost always look at my new text messages” he helpfully explained.

The fact is that I do text, but I never associated immediacy with texting.  That was perhaps one of the underlying tenets of What Works Better When in fact, namely that when an immediate response is required, phone calls and instant messages are the obvious choices.

Therein lies the rub.  The mail-order business used to say “One person’s junk mail is another person’s L.L. Bean catalog” and the same holds true today for the variety of tools we have for reaching people.

The problem is that it’s up to the sender (in this case, me) to keep up with all of these individual preferences.

Do I text Mark before calling?

Do I simply leave Paula a voicemail, knowing she always calls back quickly?

Do I reach out to Hans-Peter via Facebook to set up a time to chat?

Do I simply just dial someone if I need to get them?

If I do e-mail someone before calling, which e-mail do I use (while I still advocate the use of one e-mail address and inbox, the majority of knowledge workers seem to have several and they are not tied together)?

One physician I go to likes to communicate with patients via text message – and she’s very good about it.  But my phone’s battery unexpectedly ran out and I didn’t see a text that my appointment had moved.  I showed up an hour early as a result but clearly it wasn’t the end of the world.

I’ve texted people when I was running late (and in some cases couldn’t actually call) and my assumption that they actually read the texts resulted in a certain amount of confusion about whether I was showing up at all.  Furthermore, had I called, assuming the person answered, I would have known with certainty that the person got the message.  Not so with texting, you simply have to trust that the message was received and read.

I’ve called in similar circumstances, and left voicemail, only to find out that the other party never was notified (or so he claims) of the voicemail.

In the end, I think technology may have obsoleted my What Works Better When soliloquy.  In today’s increasingly frantic communications environment, it all comes down to personal preference – and that means you only have to keep track of the personal preferences of 300 or so of your closest friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

But where is the RIGHT information?

This essay is being written after numerous and somewhat frustrating encounters with the latest information technology.  One would think that we’ve reached a point where systems and computers should work flawlessly but that is less and less the case every day.

On the one hand, the Information Revolution of the late 20th century has resulted in an anywhere, anytime information society that has become accustomed to boundless gobs of information on demand.

On the other hand, no one has said that the stuff works.

From a technical standpoint, the advent of true ubiquitous computing (or at least, state-of-the-art ca. 2011) has markedly changed our attitude towards and interactions with information.  Our constant exposure to information leads us to have the expectation that it will be shared across systems, accurately and quickly.  If Facebook and Google can keep track of everything we are reading, sharing, and writing while we surf the Web, surely everyone else can too, right?

Unfortunately, information does not always get to where it needs to be.  I’ll use my recent experience with an airline as an example.   Airlines are known to be leaders in IT; American Airlines introduced the first ever computer reservation system, Sabre, in 1960.  At the time it was one of the largest and most successful mainframe deployments ever.

Today, despite tremendous advances in technology over the course of 50 years, information often fails us.  Calls to customer service representatives at call centers asking the same or similar questions yield widely disparate answers, despite the fact that the agent is being guided by the system.

My own experiences in the past week relating to several different issues with an airline, including an error that was apparently computer generated as well as misinformation that was repeated by several agents almost verbatim, show me that we have a long way to go.

It won’t surprise you to learn that fixing these problems took multiple phone calls and e-mail messages and wasted hours of time both on my part and on the part of the call center agents.

We used to say that computers don’t make mistakes, but rather that the people who write the programs do.  I believe that this belief has become somewhat quaint if not obsolete.  While we are far from enjoying true artificial intelligence where machines actually think and respond on their own, we are at a point where autonomic or self-healing systems do evolve on their own, and sometimes seem to add in mistakes just to keep things interesting.

We want the right information on demand, without delay, without error.   As we add in more information, more systems, and more ways of getting information, what we end up with is something very different.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.