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Agree? Disagree? Stop sounding off to your computer screen! Instead,
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It wasn't supposed to be this way. All those beeping, chiming, chirping devices were supposed to bring fleet-footed Mercury to communication and bulldog power to the gathering of information. Technology was supposed to make work faster and easier.
But as wave after wave of breakthrough technology crashes against the shores of commerce, a lot of debris is washing up as well--systems that don't work as well as we had hoped and the resulting flotsam of frustration and bewilderment.
How can anyone keep up with the flood of e-mail, voice mail, faxes, and phone calls? How can a manager extract the nuggets of value from the torrent of available information in order to make good decisions? How does an executive get a handle on the technological sea change when she can't get her own e-mail answered?
"I receive at least 30-50 e-mails and 15 voice mail messages every day, plus faxes, post mail, and phone calls," says Dominick Cilea, president of Springboard Communications, a high-tech marketing firm in New Jersey. "It's becoming extremely difficult to focus and navigate through the day with all these 'important' obstructions."
This is the lament of the Information Age. Too much communication in too many forms that impede rather than enlighten. Too much general information; too little of it pertinent and useful. "Garbage at the speed of light," says one observer. Consider: - The average Fortune 1000 worker sends and receives 178 messages a day, according to a study commissioned by Pitney Bowes.
- Forty-four percent of executives interviewed by Reuters in 1996 believe the cost of collecting information exceeds its value to business.
- Almost half of those executives are "quite often" or "very frequently" unable to handle the information they receive.
- Forty-three percent of executives think important decisions are delayed and the ability to make decisions are affected as a result of having too much information.
Workers tend to "bundle" their messages, sending the same one in several forms to make sure it gets the recipient's attention
And while workers slog through a morass of communication, market forces continue to exacerbate the situation. Since work is more decentralized (scattered work teams, telecommuting, more business travel), there are more demands on long-distance communication. Since communication can be instantaneous, the expectation is that everyone will respond faster. The Pitney Bowes study found that workers tend to "bundle" their messages, sending the same one in several forms to make sure it gets the recipient's attention. And while they try to maximize access to their co-workers, they also maneuver to shield themselves from the same barrage.
Some workers do the job of "mission control"--screening messages and directing traffic through the gridlock. And some organizations have set up "knowledge departments" designed to create a depository of information that employees can easily access and to drain pertinent knowledge from the fire hose of external information. Their executives have titles Merlin would kill for: "Chief Knowledge Officer" (Sequent Computers); "Project Director of Knowledge Management" (Monsanto).
The Information Age That Ain't Yet
Welcome to a revolution in progress. We all feel the pain. It's the distress of half-baked technology and of our clumsy attempts to deal with it. "One reason we're pained by information overload is the requirements of computer operations--the six-hour afternoons trying to fix a semi-colon problem. Computers are very difficult and arcane," says Neal Goldsmith, Ph.D., president of Tribeca Research, Inc. and a specialist in technology transfer.
When it really comes of age, technology will...conform to our needs rather than testing our endurance
In fact, according to Jeff Davidson, executive director of Breathing Space Institute of Chapel Hill, Maryland, the true Information Age hasn't quite gelled yet. "In the Information Age, information will serve us, and we will not be abused by an excess of information."
When it really comes of age, these experts say, technology will be natural and intuitive, like switching on a light or picking up the telephone. It will conform to our needs rather than testing our endurance. It will serve us effortlessly rather than assailing us with incompatibilities and gibberish.
Just to put the current situation in perspective, Davidson asserts that we are besieged by more information than any other generation in the history of the world, and perhaps by more than all previous generations combined. We are on the cusp of transition to the fourth age of humankind--from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. It's a paradigm shift perhaps as disconcerting as waking up one morning to find that, far from being the center of the universe, our lowly planet doesn't even have a key to the executive washroom.
We poor mortals have developed some interesting ways of coping with revolution. Some join the feeding frenzy, logging hours on the Net, afraid to miss a byte or tittle. Others doggedly plod through the manuals as though Mother Mary Agnes still held a ruler to their knuckles. "When we feel overwhelmed, we drop back into a rote, mechanistic level," says Goldsmith. "It's a refuge that's concrete and comfortable. You can always pull out that 500-page manual."
And there's always more to feed on. More toys, more information, more upgrades, more software. With a cell phone, laptop, and portable printer, we can carry our offices anywhere. We can travel with more appendages than a squid. Dante never conceived of this particular hell.
But why? Do we do this because we need to feel busy and important or because, if we are indispensable, we won't be dispensed with? "This is fear, and it's a natural reaction to change," says Lynn Lively, author of Managing Information Overload. "But maybe people should ask themselves if the world they want to create is one in which they are totally tethered to an office. The way around obsolescence isn't to create dependency."
Indeed, fear, doubt, and uncertainty are the horsemen unleashed upon this unsuspecting age ("We call it FUD," says Goldsmith), and they are fueled by tinkers who hawk the latest upgrade, the biggest disk drive, the most powerful software. If you don't stay current, the devil whispers, you'll become obsolete, and you won't make smart decisions.
Catching the Wave
"Technology is irrelevant," says Goldsmith. "It's a load of junk." Instead, he says, surf the waves of change. Instead of watching in horror and bewilderment as new technologies whiz by like schools of fish, rise to the meta-level, catch the big picture. "Read up on trends. People like me are writing about them. You won't be smart about decisions or have a gut level understanding of the issues by drilling into technical detail."
And, the experts say, stop and smell the flowers. Take a deep breath. Get a grip. Flower-smelling has even become a corporate mandate in some places. One group of Xerox software developers experimented with an enforced "quiet time" every day, when all interaction within and without shut down. Milk and cookies, anyone?
Identify the four or five goals you want to accomplish in the coming year. (You can throw in a couple for your personal life, too.) Then jettison anything that doesn't pertain to your goals. It will be outdated before you get to it, anyway. As you gain control over technology and learn to manage it, technology may even become useful to you. E-mail, for example, can seriously clog the arteries of communication, but it can also perform miracles. Legal documents, software repairs and upgrades, book manuscripts travel electronically and instantly from one computer to another anywhere in the world. (Yeah, I know, the bugs aren't quite worked out, but light dawns on the horizon.)
Hot Tips for Communication Control
The first thing you must do, but probably won't, is to set goals. "Everybody wants hot tips, but if you don't know where you're going, tips won't help," says Lynn Lively, author of Managing Information Overload. Once you identify the handful of areas you want to organize your time around, a lot of the information you're trying to figure out what to do with becomes irrelevant.
Paper - Get rid of it; recycle it; pass it on.
- Keep the essence: tear out the magazine article or the book chapter that contains just the information you want to keep.
Develop a filing system that works (this goes for your hard drive, too). If you can't find it, you don't have it. Respond immediately. If you must respond to a letter, do it right away even if it means scribbling a note on the bottom of the original. Informal is better than weeks late. Open mail over the waste basket.
E-mail
Install a filter. Cyber servants are still in their infancy, but right now filters come with some e-mail software that allows you to screen and file it according to preset parameters. Scan headers. Learn to quickly determine what's important by the subject and sender. Sort according to a triage system: open now (messages from the boss); save for later (gossip from your sister); delete (spam). Delete. Get in the habit of clearing out your mailbox regularly. Don't distribute your address.
Voicemail
Move the work along. Each voice mail message you leave on someone's system should explain clearly what you need or expect. Make fewer calls. You'll get fewer in return. Compose succinct outgoing messages that tell people where and how to get information to you. - Listen only to as much of an incoming message as you need to figure out what the sender wants.
And while you're up there on the wave, concentrate on developing skills rather than ingesting applications. You can sell skills; applications change. Learn how to find good information, for example, rather than cursing the garbage. And, says Lively, if nothing else, learn keyboarding. Because, in case you blinked, the next wave is upon us. Computers with ever greater processing power will not only be easier to use, they will be able to take over the administrative trivia of yet another layer of worker. "The same technology that enables you to work at home one day a week will also enable the corporation to cut you loose," says Goldsmith. "Workers need to look at themselves as free agents with a portfolio of skills."
Cradle-to-grave corporate sugar has already disappeared, so greater autonomy should come as no surprise. The way to keep your peace (and sanity) in the face of revolution is to adjust your expectations. Change will continue, learn to anticipate it. There will always be more information than you can shake a disk drive at, welcome it. Decide what you need to know and ignore the rest.
And remember the message of the angels: Fear not! KATE CONVISSOR writes about everything from diaper rash to ergonomics for corporate and national magazines from her home office, where she carries on a passionate love/hate relationship with her computer.
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