Is it me or is there a trend of people who (temporarily) get rid of their smartphone or social media, for real or as experiment? Maybe it's because I just read two books about this topic and I suddenly see many news items about the same topic. Within a few days after reading these books, I read in EllE Magazine that author Zadie Smith has no smartphone and the Dutch newspaper NRC has started an experiment in which 8 people change their smartphone for 6 months for a simple Nokia mobile phone. I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon, just like when you buy a red car, suddenly there are red cars everywhere.
One book I read (in Dutch) tells the experiences of a guy (Johan van Houten) who went offline completely for a year. (Sidenote: another trend, I think, is doing something weird for a whole year and write/blog/insta about it). His experiences are sometimes funny, sometimes ironic (when a company refers him to the website for more information). Is it doable, a year without internet and mobile phone? According to this book it is, although it's not easy. Is it the solution to stress, distraction and so on? I don't think so. There is value to having internet and mobile access. It's just our behavior that's off. The author agrees and suggests a balanced online and offline life.
That's where the other book I read becomes useful. Catherine Price suggests in her book "How to break up with your phone" a 30-day plan to get into a better relationship with your phone. Both books are aimed at making us aware of our mobile phone behavior and changing it so it becomes more healthy and less stressful.
Personally, I think I'm less attached to my phone than both authors describe. Maybe it's because I have many offline distractions (running, reading, knitting) and didn't have TV for many years (we have Netflix now). On the other hand, I use my smartphone a lot for e-mail, searching for information (for example, train departure times), social media and online banking. I wouldn't want to do without it, but i don't feel addicted. Still, it's good to become aware of one's behavior and I'm probably more hours online than I think now. Of the two books, the second book is most practical with a plan instead of a range of tips.
In an earlier post, my review of The Circle, I referred to the book "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson. This is another book I reviewed for Managementboek.nl, about a year ago (review in Dutch). It relates to one of my topics of interests, information overload, which I studied years ago at Telematica Instituut with a few companies. The topic still has my interest and sometimes I wonder how much has changed over the years (not much, I guess).
Recently, information overload came up in my conversations with the owner and founder of GoalRecorder, a Waterloo start-up company that recently launched its product. GoalRecorder deals with productivity by aligning activities of employees with company goals. Information overload results in a lack of productivity and I can see a link with goals as well (with a clear goals, it's easier to filter information).
Therefore, my translation of the review in Dutch here. The book I read was translated into the Dutch, so my translation back into the English could result in picking different words than the book uses.
My review of "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson, as published in Dutch at Managementboek.nl.
How healthy is your lifestyle? You eat healthy, move regularly and don't smoke. Have you however looked at your information diet as well? You read it correctly: your information diet. Each day, you consume a large amount of information, but have you considered how healthy or unhealthy your information consumption is? This question is the core of "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson. The good news is that you can start changing your information diet today!
Clay Johnson noticed in his work, he was responsible for several political campaigns, that many people have an disturbed image of reality. Initially, he thought that it was caused by lack of information about the topic. This appeared not to be true, providing them with more information didn't correct the image.
People, and so do you, absorb information selectively. Often it is a confirmation of the ideas they already have. Next to that, most people prefer information that is easy to digest. Johson compares this behaviour with eating unhealthy fast food and the preference we have for sweet and fat food. Maybe it's time for an information diet! To start, it's good to realise that you have a choice. You don't necessarily need to consume less information (as the word 'diet' might suggest), but different information.
New technologies are often blamed for issues like information overload. Clay Johnson claims that the fault is not with the technology but with providers and consumers of the information offered through technology. Information overload does not exist; your own information habits give you an unpleasant feeling. Most information channels provide the 'news' that get the highest number of clicks on the website. Personalisation technology, that provide you information based on earlier behaviour, emphasises our selective preference for certain information. Some parties benefit from distributing information that shows only one side of the coin, like in discussions about climate change. And, how independent is research sponsored by industry?
Johson gives us many reasons to aim for a heathier information selection. How can you do that? The elements of an information diet, according to Johnson, are: information literacy, sense of humour and a method to train our attention span.
The information skills you need are the following: searching, filtering, sorting and processing of informatoin. Go back to the source as much as you can and consume local information (compared to global), advises Johnson. Laughing is a healthy part of the diet too. The final element of the information diet takes a bit more time and requires gradual building up. The principle: start your work without scanning internet or email for a certain time and then you take a break where you are allowed to browse whatever you want. Gradually increase the time of the working blocks, so you learn to concentrate and don't let yourself distract by all kinds of information. What helps is to unsubscribe from many email distribution lists and become selective in the information you read.
Clay Johnson's intention is to make you aware of your information consumption. Not only that, he provides practical help to change your behaviour and become healthier. The comparison with food diet is a good one, because these days more and more people have become obese, which is often the result of (bad) food habits. Making conscious choices, whether it is about food or information, "The Information Diet" by Clay Johnson helps you with those choices.
My thoughts, learning from this book.
When I read this book, I thought: Yeah, I know this and I have good information literacy skills. Still, I think I can improve (and most of us can). I get distracted by all kinds of useless information. At the same time, I think I need this type of easy reading too, to relax. I read many books, non-fiction and fiction, but after reading a management book that needs all my attention, I relax with an easy book (category drama or chick-lit). As long as those easy consumption books and web pages don't take over too much of my time.
We often think we can do everything at the same time. While we’re on the phone with a customer, we finish an e-mail message to a colleague. We’re such efficient workers! In “The myth of multitasking”, Dave Crenshaw demonstrates us that the opposite is true. It is a thin, small book, written as a business fable. With a picture of a Blackberry smart phone at the front, symbol of devices that stimulate multitasking.
Phil is consultant time management. He visits Helen, manager at a fashion retail chain, who stringently needs his advice. She is always under time pressure. Helen is the self-appointed queen of multitasking. “Multitasking is a lie”, argues Phil. In contrast to what many people think, multitasking is not efficient at all. And often it’s not even effective.Switchtasking, which is, according to Crenshaw, a better term for multitasking, involves the switching between one task and another. Phil shows Helen that this switching between tasks brings costs, switch costs, for the time that is needed to pick a task after an interruption.
Imagine, you are writing an e-mail message and the telephone rings. You answer the call and continue with writing the message. First however, you have to re-read the message to understand what you were saying. The time you need to read your written message is lost time. This is caused by moving your attention from one activity to another and back to the first activity. The switch in this example (the telephone rang while writing a message) is a passive switch, caused by another person. Active switches are done by you, when you decide not to finish the message and do something else. The higher you are in the organization, the more roles you have and the greater chance of switchtasking. If you can’t avoid passive switches, at least try to avoid active switches is Crenshaw’s advice.
Back to the story of Helen and Phil. Helens staff never knows when she is available for questions. They seize every opportunity to talk to her and try to cover as many items as possible. However, Helen only listens half, wanting to finish the financial report. The behavior of Helen’s employees is typical, according to Phil. She has to be clearer about when she can be disturbed and when not. She needs to plan this time, as well as regular meetings with her most important staff. In that way her staff knows better when to approach her. Plus, Helen can give her employees more attention during the meetings.
Dave Crenshaw combined a lot scientific research and articles written about multitasking and wrote an easy to read book with a clear message: Stop with the continuous switching from one task to another! Some readers will know this already, for other readers this may be an eye-opener. The exercises Phil does with Helen can be done with the sheets in the back of the book. The story of consultant Phil with his client is alternated with facts and striking statements. Interesting pieces, but they make me wonder: isn’t this another form of switchtasking?
I knew it, open offices can't be good for concencration. Researchers found too that production is lower, as is concentration, leading to stress. Unfortunately I couldn't find the research they refer to.
In both my Canadian work
places I was (and am) working in a cubicle setting. Now I realize what
a luxury it was in The Netherlands, where I shared a rather large room
with one colleague. In France, I worked from home, which is again
different.
I never felt so much distracted as I did
before. I have to get used to unwillingly overhearing telephone
conversations, people passing my desk who don’t come to see me (I’m on
the way to reception and exit, so there is some traffic going on). When
I read about distraction, it’s mainly about incoming e-mail messages.
Well, these are the least of my concerns! I know how to shut these down
or how to filter them, but I find it harder to close my ears and my
eyes for the other work environment-related distractions. The problem
is: the more often I’m distracted, the more chaotic becomes my work
style. What happened to the efficient-working me? I’m starting 101 new
tasks, but have to keep a list of activities; otherwise I just forget
to finish them. This has nothing to do with multi tasking, which at
least has the sound of efficiency, but jumping from one task to the
other.
On the blog Lifehacking.nl, which I discovered
recently, I read about Attention Firewalling (posting is in Dutch). That’s what I should do:
put a firewall on for the noise around me and people walking by. Sort
of ear and eye cups. Maybe I just need an iPod with silence!
Earlier this year (wow, August, time flies!), I wrote that a paper to which I contributed was accepted for the OzChi'06 conference in Sydney. It is titled "An Information Overload Study: Using Design Methods for Understanding" and it describes studies we did in several organisations to find out what is information overload and how it is perceived by employees. One of the authors and former colleague was in Sydney to present the paper, which received many nice reactions. Here is the link to the paper and the presentation. The paper will also be available through the acm portal.
Our paper on information overload, which was accepted for the OzChi'06 conference, deals with the question "What is information overload?", or "How do people perceive information overload", when they say they suffer from it. I'm not going to describe here all we did - for that you better go to the conference and listen to what the first author will present (yes, she is the one who "won" and is allowed to go to Sydney).
Our own working definition of information overload (IO) is the following: Information overload is the feeling of stress when the information load goes beyond the processing capacity.
One of the methods we used to find out how employees perceive IO is cultural probing. Employees were given instant cameras and they were asked to picture their situations of information overload. We didn't give them our definition of IO, we left it open to their interpretation. The employees, after having taken some pictures, handed the camera to a colleague, who takes a few pictures, etcetera, and after a few weeks we collected the cameras. The result was a large collection of various pictures of work and home situations. People pictured their desks, covered with document, the screen of their computers with a long list of unread e-mails. Pictures of corridor talk, the telephone, a store room full with books, and one person even had a picture taken of his head. We tried to categorise the pictures, for some pictures we went to the person who took it to ask what he/she meant with it. For example, with the list of e-mails: does it mean "more work to do" or maybe "I don't know why I get this e-mail". We came to the following categories (from the paper):
Task Complexity, which is highly related to the work itself, Environment Distracters such as a nearby coffee corner or noisy machine, Social Pressure, such as requests for assistance, and Information Ambiguity when tasks or requests are unclear.
Most pictures were in the category "task complexity", followed by "information ambiguity". Task complexity could be explained by the type of work of the employees (research), which is usually not a clearly defined task. This we explored in another study, which is described in the same paper. We saw that people started talking about the topic. Some participants found it fun to take pictures, others found it silly or said they didn't have time for it. For me it was a new way of collecting data. And even though it is not the same as doing interviews (where you can go in depth), as well as difficult to interpret the results (subjective - we see the categories as a first structuring), it is nice to see as well how many pictures were taken and how involved people became. I've never had so many questions of interest to a study. As a first step in getting a shallow topic, like IO, clear, the cultural probes study gave us a lot of insight.
I found a new weblog (in Dutch) called Oplossingsgericht management (solution-directed management). In one of the newest posts I read about a interruptions. It was one of the topics we studied (in a research for my former employer) in our information overload research. What is interesting, the posting refers to an interview with Gloria Mark who did a lot of research on interruptions.
Knowledge workers are interrupted a lot. It seems that they on average can only work 3 minutes before being interupted, by the phone, by e-mail, by a colleague. What can you do in 3 minutes? Not much! I found that, now I work at home, I work much more efficient. Especially because I'm not much interrupted. On the other hand: interruptions are sometimes welcome. After a day of working I miss colleagues, someone to talk with. I then call my boyfriend (to interrupt his work) or send an e-mail to a friend. Without interruptions I feel lonely at the end of the day, so I choose to interrupt when I'm not interrupted for a while. For me, there is a big social part in interruptions (what I'm missing now).
Lee LeFever nicely describes how he drowns in the flow of information generated by RSS feeds. I think a lot of people will recognise it when he writes:
Unfortunately I don’t get paid to read them and when I get busy, they build up, making me feel like I’m missing something. They mock me, those feeds, I swear.
I really want to keep up because it makes me aware and more informed. When they build up, I just nuke the whole bunch and start from scratch. Blowing off a few days of feeds makes me feel guilty and a bit liberated at the same time. This was the case when I returned from a couple of days off recently.
The problem starts with the "need" to be informed, being afraid to miss something (essential). On the one hand, RSS can be very useful in keeping up-to-date, but on the other hand it takes time, especially after being away a few days. Lee continues:
In the future, developing a style and strategy of managing the flow is going to be a required skill.
My strategy after a holiday or long time not being able to read the feeds, same as Lee describes, is to delete all the new stuff. I wonder what are others do? Try to read it all?
To finish with Lee, sounding close to despair:
I'm keeping my head above water for now, but I've got a long way to go and I see more and more flow coming my way every day. Maybe its time to get a snorkel.
