I have written about information overload and the research conducted by its namesake group on this blog a number of times. Now IORG is bringing renewed attention to this problem by declaring August 12 “Information Overload Awareness Day” and holding a half-day online event, presenting findings of their research and options to lessen the impact.

The keynote is being presented by Nathan Zeldes, the former “Information Overload Czar” at Intel and current President of the IORG.

Other speakers include:

• Noted authors Maggie Jackson (“Distracted”) and Mike Song (“The Hamster Revolution”)
• Edward Stern, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Dept. of Labor
• Mark Hurst, Creative Good and author of “Bit Literacy”
• John Hagel, co-chairman, the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation
• Seth Earley, Earley & Associates
• Anne-Katrin Neyer, School of Business and Economics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Peter Marksteiner, Colonel, U.S. Air Force
• Paul Silverman, Integra
• Christina Randle, The Effective Edge
• Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex
• Executives from a variety of companies including Dow Jones and Morgan Stanley.
• A panel of Visionary Vendors with tools that help lower Information Overload including Matt Brezina, co-founder, Xobni, Deva Hazarika, CEO, ClearContext, Julia White, director of product management, Microsoft, and Tomer Shalit, CEO, Nordic River

If you are interested in this topic (and who isn’t with the ever increasing onslaught of email, rss-feeds, twitter and social media), you can register for the event here.  Permessa is a sponsor of the event and we are able to offer a limited number of free guest passes (a $50 value).  Simply use “PermessaGuest” as the discount code on sign-up.

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So is Twitter over-hyped or the future of electronic communication?

Don Dodge has written a great set of posts covering the phenomenon:

Many are saying Twitter has “jumped the shark”, is overhyped, ruined, and will never be the same.

Guy Kawasaki calls it “the most powerful marketing tool invented since TV,…and it’s free.

If you feel inspired by all of this and decide to start tweeting, perhaps first check out the Top 13 Twitter Don’ts published by PCMAG.

I’m still on the Twitter sidelines, trying to figure out how to possibly manage another information channel blaring at me 24×7, but just in case I reserved a spot.

I’m curious to hear other peoples thoughts on Twitter and how they use it, so please chime in.  Comments, tweet or emails are welcome.

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The State Departments responded by announcing “unspecified disciplinary actions” to employees who keep using reply-to-all, and they delivered this news via old-fashioned cable.

“Department staff hitting ‘reply to all’ on an e-mail with a large distribution list is causing an e-mail storm on the department’s OpenNet e-mail system,” says the unclassified cable that was sent Thursday by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.
He said the result was ‘effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails.

The cable orders employees to ‘take immediate action’ to ensure they and their colleagues are ‘aware of the negative impact’ of hitting ‘reply all’ and to delete e-mails addressed to large numbers of people that they might receive in error.

Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions, Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins:  Please ensure widest distribution of this message. Some also compounded the problem by trying to recall their initial replies, generating yet another round of messages.”

I am still amazed how little control many companies and government agencies assert over their critical communication infrastructure.  Distribution lists, reply-to-all, mail forwarding, restricted content, etc. should all be governed by administrative rules that protect the company from serious technical and legal consequences.

The technology certainly exists…

Technorati Tags: reply-to-all, email security, us state department

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I met Jared Goralnick, an efficiency and productivity consultant, at the inaugural IORG conference last summer in NY, and he told me about a solution he had been working on, called AwayFind.

AwayFind launched yesterday and is a smart alternative to static out-of-office responders.  The web-based solution will work with any email platform.  You simply embed a link to your personalized AwayFind webpage into your email signature or out-of-office message.  Anybody who needs immediate attention can follow the link to fill out a contact form, which then is routed to you via SMS or private email.

The pro-version even allows you to configure categories, to automatically delegate requests to co-workers.

There is no single solution to fight email overload, but AwayFind might become another weapon in your arsenal.

Technorati Tags: awayfind, email responder, out-of-office message

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This convenience comes at a price.  Not only do our our inboxes become increasingly cluttered, but the more often we share our primary address on the Internet the greater the chance of getting onto spammers distribution lists as well.

I learned that lesson the hard way at the end of Dot-Com.  As fast as many of those companies went out of business, their customer or subscriber email addresses seemed to end up in spammer’s hands, either because of carelessness or perhaps for profit.

I decided then to stop sharing my primary email address with just anybody. Instead, I set up a special catchall email domain that allowed me to assign a dedicated address to every vendor, newsletter subscription, internet forum etc.  Any email addressed to the catchall domain is by default accepted and forwarded to a single mailbox.  That way I can hand out new addresses on the fly, like: amazon@catch-all-email.com, ups@catch-all-email.com, etc.  If I start receiving spam on any of these addresses I simply put them on a blacklist and future emails won’t go through. As a nice side effect, I can also track who is sharing or leaking my address purposely or due to internal data security problems.

This system has worked really well for many years now.  Of course, not everybody has the time and know-how to set this up, but there are a number of ways and solutions around that.

Many people are simply using free email accounts on Google, Yahoo! or Hotmail for this purpose.  Google’s powerful inbox filters easily sort and organize this catchall inbox.

There are now also a number of new services that productize the concept I described above.  Here are a couple that are worth mentioning:

• OtherInbox has launched a private Beta for their consumer service. There are a few Beta invites that they have shared with me. So feel free to check it out.
• Reflexion is offering a similar solution targeted at enterprise customers and ISP’s.

While it’s never too late to bring some order to your inbox, the best time to set up this kind of inbox management is when you switch to a new email address.

Technorati Tags: email overload, inbox management, catchall inbox, catchall account, otherinbox, refexion

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“When you’re done with your email queue, are you done?
Do you spend your day responding and reacting to incoming [messages] all day… until the list is empty? … and then you’re done.“

This is a great follow-up to the discussion at IORG a few weeks ago.

• About 12% of the average worker’s time is spent thinking or reflecting, while 28% of time is consumed by disruptions  from things that aren’t urgent  or important,  like unnecessary email messages and the time it takes to get back on track. (Jonathan Spira, Basex)
• Employees at Intel spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email. (Nathan Zeldes, Intel)

New social media with its constant chatter of invites, pings and pokes seems to exacerbate the problem.

Is most of your day consumed by simply processing information, rather than initiating, reaching out, inventing and designing?

Technorati Tags: email productivity, information overload

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IORG – the Information Overload Research Group was founded earlier this year by a group of industry experts and research analysts to address the growing concern of continued information overload, the negative impact on worker productivity and the resulting “burn-out” of today’s knowledge workers.

I have covered this important issue in previous blog posts and it is refreshing to see that now some of the world’s leading companies and universities are dedicating resources to study the effects of information overload.

The groups goal is to share information, develop best practices and contribute to the creation of solutions to the problem as outlined in the mission statement:

“We work together to build awareness of the world’s greatest challenge to productivity, conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload.”

The conference started with a gala dinner, which was a great way to exchange observations, real-world experiences and new ideas with fellow attendees. The next day consisted of presentations from industry experts, and panel discussions. Jonathan Spira, the CEO of Basex, set the tone by sharing some of the hard numbers and facts in his keynote presentation. Basex estimates the annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers at $650 billion in the United States alone.

For more details, please check out Jared Goralnick’s blog, which has an excellent summary of the event.

I am looking forward to future IORG events and as a member, Permessa is committed to contribute to the group’s mission.

Technorati Tags: email overload, information overload, information overload research group, IORG, worker productivity

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My personal favorite, number 36:

“If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?”

Technorati Tags: email checklist, seth godin, email best practices, email overload

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Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

This is a significant finding especially in times where tight IT budgets are strained by rapidly growing message volumes and resulting skyrocketing bandwidth & storage costs.

What this really means is that there is a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce operating costs by going after the cause of this excessive email traffic. Don’t worry, I am not proposing to fire the 1% of offending employees.

There are ways to manage email more efficiently without adversely affecting users or business operation.

Permessa just published a whitepaper (I am a co-author), titled “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs”. The paper highlights areas for managing excessive email traffic, such as unnecessary reply-to-all, attachment ping-pong and the overuse of mailing lists. Some of these have been previously discussed on this blog. For each topic area the whitepaper makes best practice recommendations on how to implement email policy changes that can prevent the negative effects and help save money.

Technorati Tags: email costs, information overload, best practices to reduce email overload, permessa

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“Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially.

Finally, consider mailbox size. A 10MB mailbox was once the norm and was replaced with 100-200MB mailboxes in recent years. Today users expect multigigabyte mailboxes, made famous by Google’s Gmail.”

Interestingly Bob’s prediction for the future holds true already. We routinely see very large mailboxes at our customers, often exceeding the 10GB mark.

Just like Moore’s law, which will eventually hit the atom barrier, the usefulness of email will diminish as mailbox size and message load keep growing exponentially.

Technorati Tags: email growth, moore’s law, ferris

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