Just one more text...

If you’re staying up late reading and/or writing e-mail, doing work, reading online forums and news, catching up on social networks – and then find yourself sleep-deprived the next day, you’re not alone.

Sleep deficiency is a major problem for knowledge workers who, due to increased mobility, are now more likely then ever to continue their work from home after leaving the office.  Even setting aside the pressure (some would even say the necessity) of answering e-mail messages or working on projects late into the night, the temptation of late-night recreational Internet and technology use is omnipresent.

Such behavior is considered poor sleep hygiene, a term that refers to one’s habits and practices at bedtime as well as environmental factors that may influence the length and quality of one’s sleep.

Consider the following statistics from the National Sleep Foundation’s 2011 “Sleep in America” poll:

- 39% of Americans bring their mobile phone into bed with them and end up using it in the hour before they go to sleep.  The number is even higher for younger Americans, 67% of 19-29 year olds.  21% of Americans end up texting during this time.

- Those individuals that end up texting in the hour before sleep are more likely to report bad sleep and not feeling refreshed.

- 1 in 10 Americans is woken up by mobile phone alerts from texts, calls, and e-mail.  The number rises to nearly 1 in 5 for 19-29 year olds.

- 36% of Americans use their laptop in bed before they go to sleep, and this group reports that it is less likely to get a good night’s sleep.

Why does this matter?  Surely we are able to deal with the loss of a little sleep in exchange for getting out that important e-mail or sending that last text of the day, right?

Unfortunately not, according to the UK-based Mental Health Foundation.  The organization’s 2011 “Sleep Matters” report notes that individuals who experience even mild sleep disorders are four times more likely to have relationship problems, three times more likely to lack concentration during their work day, three times more likely to struggle to accomplish tasks at work or during their day, and over twice as likely to suffer from energy deficiency.

Last week (in case you missed it due to being tired) was Drowsy Driving Prevention Week, a public awareness campaign by the National Sleep Foundation to highlight the issue of sleep safety.  To put the problem in perspective, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that drowsy driving results in 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and more than 100,000 accidents each year.  The National Sleep Foundation estimates that drowsy driving is involved in about one in six deadly crashes and one in eight crashes resulting in hospitalization.

Presuming you are not nodding off while reading this, consider how lack of sleep might be impacting your productivity and effectiveness.  Before going to sleep, lay off e-mail and texting, and maybe even try just turning all of your devices completely off.

Sweet dreams.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

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.

Since Basex:TechWatch was founded in 1997, its mission has been to present a weekly digest of news and information on topics and offerings relating to knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Over the past 14 years, the amount of stuff (the only word that really describes it) that could conceivably fall into these categories has expanded exponentially.  As a result, Basex:TechWatch became somewhat bloated and almost doubled in size.

Given our increased focus on the problem of Information Overload in recent years, we have decided to put Basex:TechWatch on a diet of sorts.  We will do this by sharpening our focus around knowledge sharing and collaboration with an eye towards tools that could help knowledge workers deal in a better manner with the burden of too much information.

An example of this is the dramatic increase in the number of mobile devices such as smartphones that seem to come onto the market each week.  Since the difference between many of these devices is minimal, we have reduced our coverage accordingly and will only include those which we feel are innovative and relevant to the topic at hand.

This won’t happen overnight but we do think you’ll find the new, slimmed-down Basex:TechWatch to be more on topic and even more useful in providing you with a quick overview of new products, offerings, services, and updates that have been announced in the preceding week.

We’ll continue to work to fine tune Basex:TechWatch, and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to e-mail us at btwsuggest@basex.com.

Click here if you would like to sign up for a free subscription to  Basex:TechWatch.

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.

At your service.

Although Apple’s keynote presentation last week left many underwhelmed (no iPhone 5), there was one bright spot for knowledge workers: Siri.  The new feature is a voice activated virtual assistant that allows users to use voice commands to control functions on the iPhone such as speech-to-text, calendaring, and calling.  More significantly, Siri features natural language processing that enables users to make queries and searches and receive answers.

Search as we know it is significantly limited by its design.  Typical searches return correct result sets, meaning a list of sources that meets the search criteria.  Unfortunately, searches typically don’t return correct answers; you must do that part of the work yourself by combing through the result set.  Not only is this time consuming, but the process of sorting through the search results opens up the possibility of ending up in selecting and using the wrong information.

During Apple’s announcement, the company showed a demo video of Siri that included a woman asking her iPhone “Is it going to be chilly inSan Franciscothis weekend?” Siri responded “Not too cold, maybe down to 61 degrees.”  She asked a question, and got an answer.  Typically, she would have accessed Google on her smartphone or PC and typed “San Franciscoweather.”  She would have been rewarded with links to weather sites, as well as a relatively handy weather forecast image at the top of the results page.  She would have gotten the information she needed, but not in the same way.  A traditional search for the information would have returned correct results, but not the specific answer to her real question.

Voice activated commands are nothing new, and Siri’s original iPhone app has been around since February 2010.  Apple acquired the company in April of 2010, and has given the underlying virtual assistant technology the Apple design treatment, tightly integrating it into all areas of the iPhone 4S.  Siri is activated by holding down the home button, and then asking a question or giving a voice command.  Siri will ask clarification questions if needed until it has the information it requires for the task.  For fact checking, Siri leverages connections to sources such as Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha.

Siri has roots in cognitive software with artificial intelligence incorporated into its code, which was originally developed by the Stanford Research Institute in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  Originally dubbed CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes), the project’s goal was to develop software for interrelated decision-making tasks that had previously been resistant to automation.  To succeed, the cognitive software needed to learn from experience, take orders, explain its own actions, and respond to unexpected input.

Despite its serious sounding roots, Siri on the iPhone 4S seems destined to be used for finding restaurants, booking movie tickets, and voice automation tasks such as speech-to-text and controlling phone functions.  However, the potential of the tool to revolutionize how we think about search is tremendous.  Apple has thrown its weight behind the virtual assistant concept and, if the company’s past successes are any indication, there is a good chance that others will follow.  Existing companies in the space, such as Nuance, could also find increased interest in their offerings.

Improving the search experience for knowledge workers and consumers is sorely needed, and with Apple’s considerable backing, Siri just might be the first step in a larger evolution of search that emphasizes correct answers over correct results.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

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.

At your service...

Uncoupling your physical presence from your office and working remotely is no longer a pipe dream; increasingly high numbers of knowledge workers are doing it everyday.  For over a decade now, technology has allowed off site workers to access e-mail, chat via instant messaging, and attend online meetings from anywhere with an Internet connection.

But what about keeping tabs on what is happening on the factory floor, or popping into the ad hoc meetings that take place in a co-worker’s office?  For that, you need your own telepresence robot, and unfortunately they tend to be very expensive.

Your basic telepresence robot comes with a basic set of features that includes a camera, display screen, microphone, and speakers.  Prices vary widely.  The QB telepresence robot from Anybots runs $15,000 and features automatic obstacle avoidance.  A cheaper model from Vgo costs $6,000, and you can even make an appointment and test drive one in their office via their Web site.  In the pipeline, iRobot, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaners and the military PackBot, is working on Ava, a robot that uses an Android tablet as its head and brains.  For users who need to be able to move around an office or factory floor and visually see what is going on and interact with people. For users with disabilities, which prevent them from going to work or moving about the office once there, robotic telepresence may be appealing and very useful.

Not all solutions are expensive however.  This past weekend I attended Maker Faire NYC.  For the uninitiated, Maker Faire is an event sponsored by Make Magazine (a Do-It-Yourself magazine) to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the DIY mindset.”  The event is a sort of high school science fair on steroids; it features exhibits, speakers, demonstrations, workshops, and showcases for new and emerging technologies.

One project presented at the event was a DIY telepresence robot dubbed MAYA (Me And You Everywhere).  Designed and built by Ben Hylak, a 14 year old student, the robot uses a Roomba as its platform and an Acer Aspire netbook running RoboRealm software for control.  Two-way audio and video communication is enabled via Skype and built-in speakers and a Webcam.  The body of the robot is an upside-down plastic trashcan (which looks surprisingly good), with a 15” LCD display mounted on top.  The robot also features object recognition that Ben programmed to identify different kinds of pills (he envisions healthcare applications), and an articulated arm with a gripping device.

The cost of Ben’s MAYA robot?  Under $500, and he is selling the kits that would allow you to make one at home if you are feeling handy and want a weekend project.  Just think, you could send your new robot to work in your stead next week.

I don’t necessarily expect any executives to take the cheap route and place bulk orders for a DIY telepresence robot made from a vacuum cleaner and a plastic trashcan.  However, as demonstrated by this motivated and obviously intelligent 14 year old, the tools for implementing robotic telepresence at a reasonable price point are out there.  Expect to see more of these kinds of robots in the near future, and don’t be surprised when you run into one at the water cooler.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.  He can be reached at cburke@basex.com