Managing information overload

1. The problem
2. Communications media: pros and cons
3. Things you can do
   1. As an individual
   2. As an organization

The problem

In this age of the global Internet we all have multiple channels of communication we must deal with: the Web, the corporate intranet, Internet email, internal corporate email, phone calls and voice mail, paper mail (FedEx, postal, interoffice, bulletin board) and last but not least, drop-ins ("hey, got a minute?"). One constantly hears that people are overwhelmed, that they struggle to cope with it all and still get any work done. I think this is partly because people (and managers) don't give enough thought to using these channels with maximum efficiency, according to their different characteristics.

I think the main chronic problems are:

1. Too much paper and voice mail that would be better as email or on the intranet.
2. Policy updates dumped into email to "Everyone" that should be published on the intranet instead, so everyone can consult the same reference.
3. Company intranets that aren't as functionally useful to the organization as they could be.

The reasons why mostly have to do with human nature:

• Paper memos and phone calls are still more familiar to people than email. We tend to reach for that phone or print a memo without even thinking about it.
• Most people don't control their email very well. I think part of the blame for that rests with indiscriminate corporate adoption of Microsoft Outlook, the worst case of galloping featuritis I'm aware of. People need to be able to review their mail quickly, control their folder system, and be able to figure out how to set up and modify automatic mail filtering into folders. Shoveling in calendaring, faxing, and a partridge in a pear tree is not helpful to the large majority of users who aren't interested in doing that stuff on the computer.
• Many companies have an intranet of some sort now, but employees in most companies have no easy way to publish on the intranet. Of course, this means the intranet serves little useful purpose, and is mainly a sort of decoration on the network, but this doesn't seem to bother anybody. Apparently not having to admit you don't have an intranet is much more important than whether the organization benefits from it.
• Certain managers* seem to make a point of using phone calls and voice mail, when they could easily use email, purely as an expression of dominance. Apparently the person who has to make the notes is the subordinate. Or in some cases, the manager might actually be thinking about future deniability. In any case, this behavior wastes paid employee time without benefit to the organization.

"Publishing" policy/procedure directives by sending email to "Everyone" is especially pernicious. Managers are able to say with superficial truth that the information has been made available, but employees have no reliable way to determine current policy later. Also, every employee must react separately to every such email by storing it or updating their own separate summary of policies; compare to one person's time adding the same information to an intranet page.

When it's difficult for employees to determine reliably what the right procedure is, small violations of policy probably become common. Which benefits an organization more, clear policies and procedures that are easy for everyone to follow, or maintaining disciplinary pretexts for most employees?

* If I worked for you recently, and you were wondering if I was talking about you ... forget it. The person that taught me this particular lesson was somebody I worked for several years ago, and the last I heard, that person no longer works there.

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Media pros and cons

All these media still have their places, including drop-ins, meetings, phone calls, and voice mail. If your hair is on fire, email is probably not the form of communication you need right now.

* Asynchronous communication as used here describes media such as paper mail, electronic mail, and intranet publishing, in which transmission and reception of the information happen at different times, at the convenience of all parties involved. Synchronous communication describes media such as meetings and phone calls, in which all parties must participate at the same moment in time, regardless of what they'd rather be doing.

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Things you can do

As an individual

Use appropriate media. Ask yourself: "do I really need to phone this person right this second, or go pester them?" Would email work just as well? Is this something my group/my department/everyone should be able to refer to at need, meaning it should go on the intranet instead? I think appropriate use of voice mail is when you're calling on an urgent matter, and your voice-mail message just says to call back or maybe check email ASAP. When you use voice mail instead of email to send detailed information, you're willfully interfering with the other person's management of their work time ... and what goes around, comes around. It probably would be more considerate, cost-efficient, and accurate to use self-documenting email for that instead.

Learn to write good email Subject lines. Your Subject line should be short, meaningful, and make it clear what your email message is about. This is a courtesy to the recipient; they will know something about how to handle your message from the display in their Inbox screen, before they even see your message body. If you're emailing someone whose Inbox is being heavily spammed and they don't recognize your From info, if you didn't write a good Subject line they may never see your message body. This skill will also help you write effective headings and subheads in intranet content.

Learn to control and filter your email. If you're stuck with Outlook, you have my sympathies, but it can be done. If you have the opportunity to use something else, consider Thunderbird. If you routinely receive email from certain sources, or about certain subjects, that's lower priority, it's probably appropriate to create an automatic filter that moves that mail into a separate folder as it comes in. Certainly this is a good way to handle the comedy emails people like to send out to all their friends and relations. (It doesn't have to be stamped out ... just prevented from getting in your way.)

Learn to write effective intranet content:

• Learn to use the WYSIWYG authorship software. Learn the minimum about HTML tags and CSS so that you understand some of what's going on behind the scenes.
• Learn your intranet's architecture and style rules, and conform with them. The intranet content you write will be more accessible and more useful if it's formatted and structured consistently with the rest of the organization's intranet.
• Write inverted pyramids, as is taught to newspaper people. Lead with the main idea or conclusion, then the main supporting points, and then the background, so that a reader can quit at any point and still have gotten the most important information.
• Write for scan-ability: one idea per paragraph, with the main point highlighted with emphasis or as a hyperlink. (The blue/underline default treatment of hyperlinks also functions as visual emphasis; often you can take advantage of that.) Use headings and subheads, bullet and number lists, to make your information structure clear.

You can use Windows Notepad's log file feature to log your voice mail. (Of course, if people in your organization use voice mail as I suggest, you won't need to do this very often.) If you put the text .LOG all the way to the left in the first line of a Notepad file, and save it, every time you open that file Notepad will add the system time and date to the end of the file. You can then press Control-End to move to the end of the file, and begin making voice-mail notes for that day. If you close the log file without making any entries, you can just select No at the "Save changes" prompt.

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As an organization

Make it possible for appropriate employees to quickly author and publish their own intranet content, without waiting on the convenience of some IT person with their own priorities. Key technologies include:

• Standardized WYSIWYG authorship tool such as Dreamweaver/Contribute, so that people can just write, without thinking much about the underlying HTML. It may also work to have intranet content authors submit word-processor files to someone central for conversion. (See also my page on WYSIWYG HTML generators.)
• Standard structural HTML, and standardized use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). These go hand in hand. Simple HTML code free of presentational abuse of tags, especially tables, together with simple centralized control of formatting using linked CSS style sheets, simplify authorship and maintenance of intranet content. CSS makes it possible, for example, to change the formatting of all heading elements in all pages of an intranet, by editing one line in a style sheet file.
• Carefully-designed intranet information architecture, so people find things easily. The structure of an organization's intranet should reflect the way people inside the organization think about and categorize its information, not the divisional or departmental org chart.
• Limited reliance on JavaScript, CGI, and other programmers' tools. As browsers support CSS better, CSS should do a simpler and more efficient job of much of what has been done with JavaScript and giant tables, either of which will intimidate the average corporate would-be Web author. A lot of the program code that gets added to Web pages is more about job security for Web geeks than benefit to the organization.

(For more about WYSIWYG authorship tools and using simple HTML with CSS formatting, see my Web design pages.)

Encourage use of intranet publishing for coordination, at all levels from company down to small working groups. This can include status information that needs to be updated frequently, even as often as several times a day; after all, one of the main virtues of Web stuff is that publication time is measured in seconds. When you send email to "Everyone," each individual has to react to it separately, deciding whether to keep it and in which personal email folder. If you post something urgent on the intranet, you can send a much shorter global email announcing the new document; everyone can simply delete that message after reading. If the new intranet page or change isn't an urgent topic, you may not even need the email notice.

Standardize something simpler and easier than Outlook for the company's email program. I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free. (Don't take my word for it; go compare them.)

Don't permit managers to abuse phones and voice mail, in dominance games or for deniability purposes. Make this clear as explicit policy.

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