Keeping up

So many people now face an impossible challenge of keeping on top of the information that is “part” of their job that is affecting them physically. As recent article “Information Overload” notes:

Researchers now say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives – combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every email – can deplete and demoralise you.

Interestingly, that same article also points to the following:

Still, a survey of 2,300 Intel employees revealed that people judge nearly one third of the messages they receive to be unnecessary.

The reason for this is simply the fact that it is far too easy to ‘publish’ information now. Previously, if you wanted to communicate with someone you had to find a pen and paper, sit down, think about what you wanted to say, write down your thoughts, put them in an envelope, address the envelope, pay for a stamp and then mail the letter. Now people can readily blast off volumes of email with the click of a button. The emphasis has shifted from composition and creation to reading or consumption.

The problem with this shift is simply that the not only has the cost of publishing decreased but also too has the quality. Look at the number of irrelevant, poorly formatted, grammatically incorrect emails you receive. What does that tell you about the sender? What sub conscious message does it convey when you read a sloppy email? At the end of the day, it’s about your image, typing mistakes and poor grammar are the same as walking into a room looking unshowered and dishevelled. Good emails show you have both professionalism and class. For starters ask yourself what impression you form of a sender when you receive a “badly formatted” email? Now ask yourself whether you are in fact committing the same offence. And don’t forget that emails always end up being archived somewhere so your “bad” email can come back to haunt you in the future.

As I have spoken about many times in this blog before, one of the major reasons why emails are such a productivity drain is that they are set to constantly alert us to their presence. This means that most people are constantly interrupted by an ever increasing number or arriving emails, whether relevant or not. There are been a number of studies about the impact of these interruptions but here is a new one from the same article:

A study by Microsoft found that once their work had been interrupted by an email notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.

Think about this. How much work could you expect to get done in a day if you receive and interruption every 5 minutes or so and it takes you 24 minutes to return to the original task? based on these numbers you have to say that it certainly doesn’t appear much of anything is getting done does it?

How has all this happened? Simple. We have allowed the technology to dictate to us. We have created a monster and allowed to escape and ruin our lives. Wasn’t technology suppose to free us from stress? Wasn’t it supposed to give us more time? Wasn’t it suppose to allow us to get more done? By simply accepting the defaults that come with technology we are doomed to become its slave in a struggle we can never win. Yet there is hope but it comes at a price that is usually too high for most people. Eliminate the distractions, only read and respond to emails at certain times because do you get paid to process emails? Generally, most people get paid to work and as this article demonstrates there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of that going on! So turn off the emails, put the gadgets to one side and learn to live your life in control not dominated by entities that are constantly running low on power. Chances are it’ll lower your stress levels and you’ll actually start getting stuff done.

If you want some suggestions about dealing with email frustrations see my books at: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=3557478

or visit my Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/directorcia) for a number of other articles on productivity improvement.

More evidence

A while back I wrote a post about the Myth of Multi Tasking which illustrates how multi tasking actually decreases our attention and hobbles our performance. Well, here’s another article that again reinforces that notion. “Multi-media use muddles the mind” quotes a study from Stanford University that found that:

“People who regularly juggle between more than one form of media simultaneously have lower mental capacity than those who do not multi-task.”

It is amazing to me that most people seem to believe that the only way to cope with growing amounts of information is to multi-task. That only makes the problem worse! It is far more effective to simplify, streamline and focus on one task at a time and do it properly. As the study concludes:

“These results suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”

So, the more you think you can do actually the more distracted you become and in fact, after a while, it forms a behaviour pattern that reduces your ability to concentrate. So all those web sites you are visiting with flashing animations are really doing you no end of harm and the sooner you kick the habit of so called ‘multi-tasking’ the better.

Do Email Less Course

My ‘Do Email Less’ course will be running this Friday the 28th of August at Macquarie Community College at Carlingford. It’s not too late to sign up. To do so just go to the web site:

http://www.macquarie.nsw.edu.au/index.php?action=course&course_action=detail&code=309M291&search=1&keyword=email&suburb=

Apart from teaching you how to use email more efficiently it will also help you understand the technology behind email, how it works, why it fails and what you can do to troubleshoot it. Attendees will learn how to not only cope with the ever growing volume of email but also how to send more effective emails so your message will get through. This is conducted in a hands on lab environment where you’ll get practical experience in working with Microsoft Outlook 2007. All attendees will also receive a copy of my ‘Overcoming email frustrations in Outlook 2007’ as part of the course.

If you are interesting in getting back in control of you time and out of your inbox then this course is for you.

Slave labour

The article “Work four hours, then rest” contains some interesting points that are worth highlighting.

– ‘Whoever has not two thirds of his day for him self is a slave,’’ declared Friedrich Nietzsche.

Take a step back and examine your days recently. Can you honestly say you had two thirds to pursue your own agenda? Unlikely I’ll bet. Welcome to the chain gang.

– We live in an age offering unprecedented opportunity for us all to lead the kind of flourishing, leisurely existence of which the ancients could only dream. Yet many work harder and longer than ever before.

This is a point I’ve been highlighting for a while. Look at all the technology we have today. Now tell me why we are working harder than ever? Why have we less and less leisure time? My contention is that we are not using technology correctly, we are merely accepting the defaults rather than customizing it to suit the way that we work. After a while, these bad practices become the ‘norm’ and we seem to continue meekly accepting it. How many dedicate time to actually determining whether there is a better way to do something or use technology to better automate repetitive tasks? Not many I’ve seen. It’s really driving a car constantly in first gear.

– However, for most people, working beyond a certain threshold (generally estimated to be between four to six hours a day), brings comparatively small real additional benefits; yet has substantial opportunity costs, including loss of leisure.

Here’s the real story. After a certain point the harder you work the less you actually achieve yet the opportunity costs increase inversely. It is again like the car in first gear analogy, more and more revs makes little difference because you are caught in the lowest gear, taking virtually no advantage of any leverage. However, the chances of blowing the engine increases as you increase the revs. The simplest thing is to change gear, so why don’t we?

– Long working hours may certainly increase overall gross domestic product, but the evidence suggests that it does not increase productivity per hour, and it generally makes us, and those around us, quite a bit less happy than we would otherwise be.

For me here’s the bottom like – ‘evidence suggests that it does not increase productivity per hour’. Why aren’t we working to improve our efficiency and doing more with less? Why aren’t we using the technology to reduce, rather than increase our workloads? I honestly can’t understand why we are doing this. We invented all this technology, surely we can’t be that stupid can we?

As my recent ‘Power on an hour’ document illustrates, becoming more productive with technology isn’t hard, however it is journey not a destination. You always need to be on your guard against time burglars like email, web browsing, meetings and so on. In an upcoming document ‘Enough time’ I examine some simple steps that you can use to understand to ensure your time is being used most effectively.

Every time I ask people whether they have enough time I have never yet had anyone tell me they have more time available than they need. It is always the converse – “I never have ENOUGH time”. However, when you examine how people allocate their time you find they are simply wasting so much. Why is that? Simple, they don’t value their time. In essence they are too cheap. Given that you can never create or obtain more time why do people value it so lowly? That’s one reason they work such long hours. They believe they will get more in return. Clearly the evidence indicates the complete opposite. Unfortunately, people appear oblivious to the obvious and allow technology to make it worse.

Until you start valuing your time more don’t complain that you don’t have enough. Surely you’re smarter than that? Until you start asking whether what you are doing is the BEST allocation of your time at the moment then you are destined to never have enough of life’s most precious resource.

Power of an hour

I have just completed a document that provides 8 tips to improving your productivity with technology. By saving as little as 1 hour a work day you can end up generating over 240 hours a year. That works out to being more than a month of work time! Imagine what you could do with that extra time.

The document covers a range of suggestions including hardware, software and online solutions. It simply provides some quick suggestions about technology products and services that you maybe able to utilize to improve your working efficiency. Most of the suggestions can be implemented for free or very little cost which makes them even the more attractive.

Hopefully this document will prompt people into examining the options that are available with technology and look at ways they can do things better rather than simply allowing accepting the technology that you use. Successfully improving productivity comes down to two things I believe, the rights tools and the right application of those tools. Pretty much like most other successful things I suppose.

So please read the document, pass it along to other and let me know your feedback (director@ciaops.com). Don’t forget all the other documents that I also have on Slideshare including those on topics like SharePoint and Small Business Server (SBS). Stay posted to this blog for details of up coming documents.

Myth of Multitasking

I have not doubt covered this topic before in my postings but I have come across a swag of new articles that further confirm the fact that human beings are not designed to multi task. When we fool ourselves into believing we are multi tasking we are in fact simply task switching. As “Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic” details:

“The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research, Mr. Marois said, is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal, he noted.”

In “Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work” we find out how interruptions can be just as bad:

“We’ve already seen that multitasking on the road is the equivalent of drinking and driving. Other research cited by Medina shows that people who are interrupted – and therefore have to switch their attention back and forth – take 50% longer to accomplish a task, and make up to 50% more errors.”

Now translate that to the technology you are probably using now, such as email, and you may begin to appreciate why you are struggling to actually get any meaningful work done. By having your emails constantly open and allowing pop up notifications you are reducing the time you have because you are simply task switching (which requires recovery to refocus) and you are more likely to make mistakes. Tell me how that is being more productive?

The most amazing thing is that as a society we seem to believe that we all not only have the ability to multi task but that we should be doing it more often. We hold in high esteem those who appear to be good multi taskers, when in actual fact we are revering the most unproductive and error prone among us. How does that make sense? There is even a belief that kids of today are just natural multi taskers, but again as “Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic” details:

“Recently completed research at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University suggests the popular perception is open to question. A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code.

The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-text message or an instant message, the older group matched the younger group in speed and accuracy.”

So again we can see that most of our ideas about multi tasking are simply myths yet remain largely unchallenged.

Finally, here’s an article “Getting Things Done: How NOT to Multitask – Work Simpler and Saner” with some suggestion about how to avoid the traps of multi tasking and develop an environment where you can actually achieve some meaningful work.

For more information about getting assistance improving your productivity please visit our Smart Productivity site.

Illusion of freedom

We tell ourselves that technologies like the Internet, email, BlackBerry’s and mobile phones have given us more freedom. I believe that the situation is actually the reverse, that we have allowed technology to enslave us in a ways that we simply fail to even acknowledge now.

Don’t believe me? Well consider this situation and what would be the standard reaction (even more so in the current economic environment).

– You receive an email at home from you boss or a customer at 9.17pm on a week night.

what would be the most likely response do you think?

A. Ignore it.

B. Reply saying that you only deal with such matters during normal office hours.

C. Snap to attention and complete whatever the email asked.

I think most people would agree that in today’s environment option C. is going to be the likely course of action. Doesn’t that seem to indicate that the loss of boundaries between work and leisure? How has that happened? Because we have allowed technology to take control. We are no longer in control, we are no longer free to make our own choices. We ‘think’ we have more freedom but it is an illusion.

Here’s another analogy that I read recently. Imagine the reaction back in the mid 1950’s if you had tried to make an airline reservation and been told:

– You need to purchase a computer and set it up inside your house.

– You also need to pay for the electricity to run it.

– You also need to buy a printer, the ink to print and the paper that it uses.

– You now need to use the computer to do the work airline reservations people used to do since we don’t employ them anymore.

– Now, make your own reservations, print out your own ticket all on YOUR time.

Back in the 1950’s people would have thought this to be completely unbelievable while today we simply refer to it as ‘progress’! Isn’t the reality that you are now working for the airline to which you are also paying money?

So now you are working during the day, answering and attending to emails after hours (i.e. still working), then working for the airlines as well when do you get down time? How has you life been made better by technology if you are now effectively working from the moment you wake to the moment you fall asleep? How can you honesty say that technology like a Blackberry has improved the quality of your life? How can you say it has given you greater freedom? It hasn’t. It is all simply an illusion that we have allowed ourselves to believe.

OneNote vs Email collaboration

Let’s have a look at a typical scenario that illustrates how inferior email can be as a collaboration tool.

Why email isn’t good for collaboration

You start off with a document in Word say. You create an email and attach the document, then send it to someone outside your business for review. If we assume both parties are using the cache version of Exchange with Outlook, you now have created three copies of that one file (call it version 1). The first, on you local machine, the second in your sent items as an attachment to the email you sent to your colleague and finally a local copy in you cached mailbox.

Next, assume that your colleague reviewed the document you sent by firstly copying it to their local machine. They modify the document (which we will now call version 2) and return it to you via email. Apart from the three copies of version 1 of the document at your location there are now two more copies of version 1 at your colleague’s (one in their inbox and one in the local cached version of the mail box). So we are now up to 5 copies of version 1 of the document. We haven’t finished yet though. There are also now three copies of version 2 of the document at your colleague’s, one on the local hard disk, one in the sent items attached to an email reply to you and one in the cached version of the mailbox.

Even before you receive the reply from you colleague the totals so far are:

5 copies of version 1 + 3 copies of version 2 = 8 copies of various versions of the one document.

Continuing on, you receive the amended document (version 2) via email and save it to the hard disk for review. That’s added another three copies of version 2 of the document (one in your inbox, one in the cache version of your mailbox and one copy on your hard disk).

So, for a simple 2 way review of a document we have potentially generated 11 copies and at least two versions of the same document. Think that’s bad? What happens if you were now working in a team of five people all reviewing the document multiple times instead of just two? You may now begin to appreciate how poor and inefficient emails can be for collaboration.

A better way?

There must be better way. Well, I believe using a combination of hosted SharePoint and OneNote there certainly is.

The most obvious solution would seem to be to host the document in a SharePoint document library and use the built in check in/check out features. That certainly overcomes the issue with multiple copies but it is perhaps not as good in solving the collaboration question of people contributing ideas to the document. A better solution I believe is to use a OneNote notebook, on a hosted SharePoint site in which the document is embedded inside OneNote.

Using OneNote still means that every member of the team has a local copy of the document but that is a good idea if they want to work with it offline. If you where to link to a SharePoint document library using Outlook you’d get the whole document library available offline which may be not what you needed. The embedded document in OneNote would allow the team to create notes, cut and paste information into the notebook, tag items and so on as well as work on the document. In the end it provides a complete and encapsulated collaboration environment.

Now, it would be possible to achieve the same result with SharePoint alone but I believe the simplicity of OneNote makes it a winner for most people used to collaborating with emails. As time goes by they could graduate to a SharePoint only solution but using OneNote with SharePoint provides a great introduction to the other benefits SharePoint can provide team collaboration.

As I mentioned in a previous post, when you install OneNote on your system it adds some additional buttons to your applications. One of these is in Outlook like so:

This makes it extremely simple to get information out of Outlook and into something more suited to collaboration. If you are using your inbox as a storage system for information that arrives in email why not take a look at using OneNote instead? You can download the trial version for free to see whether it works for you. Even if you simply use OneNote as your own personal digital notebook I think you’ll find that it will become an indispensible application.

Conclusion

Hopefully you can begin to appreciate that there are potentially many improved methods of collaboration apart from email. Hopefully you can also appreciate that tool like SharePoint and OneNote are designed with team collaboration in mind. Hopefully now you will thinking how much extra time you can save using the right tools for collaboration. Like all work, using the right tools makes all the difference. Remember you probably don’t get paid per email you get paid on how much work you get done.