Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 27)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

 

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.
Bonnie Friedman.

A third of adults go online each day for no particular reason
Internet is just there, dangling over our heads like a mobile full of planets and kitties and smiley faces, and we're just staring up at it from our cribs like a bunch of little babies. 

188,000,000,000 emails, 60,000,000 facebook updates, 140,000,000 tweets per day

Six top tips on email overload
Six top tips on email overload... How to achieve more efficient use of email, by two experts

Email Overload? Reclaim Your Inbox, Don’t Banish It
Excessive information (including email) is a danger to productivity. It diverts attention, derails trains of thought and increases stress. However, considering Mr. Breton’s concern over the reported high level of distraction caused by reading unnecessary email messages, I’m rather surprised at the alternatives being proposed 

Zero Email Has Zero Chance, But How About An Email Diet?
Atos CEO Thierry Breton is banning company email.There’s been a lot of recent press coverage about a French company’s decision to become a “zero email” company by 2013.

You've Got Mail (But Don't Read It) : One Third of Emails Unread
I recently read that Brits receive an average of 36 emails every day but a third is never read. I wasn't surprised.

Information Overload Is Causing Illness and Costing Money, Experts Warn
The culture of modern business needs to change, with workers drowning under a deluge of emails and information, experts warned Monday 

Seven Steps to Lower Information Overload
How to keep yourself sane and functional in a world awash in data. There’s a lot being said about the problem of information overload, but not much being actually done about it.

10 Ways to Stop Communication Overload
Communication is as important as it used to be, there's just way too much of it. Communication is out of control and it's killing our productivity and effectiveness. Here's how to make it stop.

7 Steps to Dealing with Information Overload
How do we know what to focus on? How can we deem what is relevant, newsworthy, or beneficial to the maintenance of our employment status without checking it out? How do we deal with info overload?

Is technology driving you crazy - or is it really your staff?
Businesses that are serious about tackling information overload need to look beyond the technology and change their company culture, says silicon.com's Steve Ranger. I once had a colleague who had a policy of only reading email if it was addressed to him and him alone.

Stress: the curse of modern technology revealed in poll
It seems as though our ability to evolve wisely is not keeping pace with the technological revolution, and that all the wonderful new technologies that we have come to rely on are controlling many of us.

Technology as a Solution: Managing Information Overload
Julie Wedgwood introduced her talk session titled “Managing Information Overload” by speaking about how much information comes our way every single day and how that could impact the way we introduce social networking into our (learning) business 

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 26)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have,
determines your true worth - Thomas Carlyle

Clay Johnson on info overload vs. info overconsumption.
We assign blame for our overconsumption in odd ways. Gulp down one too many cupcakes and that's 100% on you. Yet, if you're overwhelmed by the fire hose/deluge/tsunami of information, blame must be placed elsewhere: on those glutton-minded information sources or the overall degradation of society or ... anywhere really, as long as it doesn't reflect back on your own lack of control. Information overload seems to always be someone else's fault. 

How Information Overload is Causing Brain Congestion
I visited him in the lab in Sao Paulo recently and he told me that we humans are suffering from information  indigestion. “We became informivores. We eat information all the time,” he said. Which can produce some unfortunate side effects: “If you eat too much information your brain can’t digest it.” 

5 Cool Ideas for avoiding information overload
The good news is that we live in an information age. The bad news is that there seems to be way too much information. Here are 5 Cool Ideas for avoiding information overload.

Information overload wastes two weeks a year
British workers have to sift through so many emails and electronic documents  that they waste nearly two weeks a year searching for information they have  previously read but then lost.

Email response expectations leading to stress: report
A new report has found that technology is accelerating email response times, creating unrealistic expectations, email overload, error and costly workplace stress. Author of Brilliant Email, published by Pearson in 2011, email management expert Dr Monica Seeley points out that a few years ago a response to an email was expected within a few days or even a week.

Lightening the load on your email inbox  
Email can be a useful tool, but the sheer volume can be overwhelming. This year, around 349 billion emails will be sent worldwide, according to the market research firm Radicati Group Inc. That total is expected to grow to 507 billion by 2013.

6 Ways to Stop Email Overload
A recent report from market research firm The Radicati Group offers some sobering statistics about email use. The number of global email accounts is expected to grow from 3.1 billion in 2011 to almost 4.1 billion by the end of 2015 — an average annual growth rate of 7 percent. Radicati estimates that roughly 350 billion emails will be sent worldwide this year and that the number will increase to 507 billion by 2013. 

Shocker: Most Americans Check Work Email During Holidays  
The majority of employed American adults (68%) with work email accounts check their messages during traditional family holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Among those checking their email, 27% do so multiple times each day. Those checking their accounts are not likely to find empty inboxes as 79% of those polled say they receive emails from clients or colleagues during the holidays.

Too much information: Data overload at work damages staff motivation, survey of 2,000 employees
Employees in the UK are “drowning in droplets rather than floods of data” at work, and are struggling to navigate, organise and digest this collectively, which is costing businesses. 

Do the Digital Natives burn out because of technological overload?  
Do the internet, the constant accessibility and the opportunity of being online 24/7 result in overload? And are particularly the Digital Natives at the risk of burning out early in their career.

 

 

 

Are incoming messages unnecessary interruptions or necessary tasks?

 

In recent months there appears to have been a proliferation of articles describing peoples attempts to work without email (you can read some here and here)

We know that this movement is in response to the overwhelming volume of incoming email but we ask if it's really the answer. We believe that managing the flow well is better than turning off the tap.

Firstly we agree with their actions in getting rid of the slightly-better-than-junk emails – the notifications you subscribed to but haven't used in some time. Simply unsubscribe.

Secondly, the newsletters and notifications that are useful, create a filter that puts them in a separate folder and schedule a time to read them to get the necessary information out of them.

Adhere to good email etiquette yourself, by only sending succinct relevant emails and spend time training those you correspond with on this.

Schedule a couple of times a day to go through incoming messages (and turn off the new message notification). Incoming messages are no longer just emails but may be coming in from a number of sources. One of the articles above made reference to their boss sending a Twitter DM instead of an email. We'd argue it's still an incoming message and will take the same processing time. In which case, it is good to have all your messages in one inbox (saves time checking multiple sources) and going through them at set times.

While doing the scheduled message check you are transforming messages into tasks – and these tasks are going to be a part of your workflow (or someone else's, if delegation is appropriate) over the next few hours, days (or weeks depending on urgency).

So despite the number of people attempting to work without email, we maintain that emails are just one form of incoming messages that every person needs to be able to manage and that getting the right training and finding the right tools is more effective than simply stopping using email.

 

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 24)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Don't Send That Email. Pick up the Phone! more
• Stop the Insanity: How To Crush Communication Overload more
• Communication Overload: A Simple Technique more
• Information overload more
• Nine Easy Ways To Eliminate E-mail Overload more
• Solving information overload: the role of manual content curation more
• Tech Talk: Tips for managing your information overload more
• New social media? Same old, same old, say Stanford experts more

Statistics

• 59% of respondants say that the amount of info they have to process at work has increased since the economic downturn more

Wisdom

• True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information. Winston Churchill

 

Can information overload affect your physical health?

We've seen a lot of statistics published in the last year about the growing amount of information available and the impact it has on individuals and businesses. There are three stats we wanted to look at more closely.

• Employee stress levels are increased when their inboxes grow by more than 50 messages a day... source
• 46.9% of respondents unable to answer all email... source
• 35% of knowledge workers suffer from health problems traceable back to information overload... source

The reason that stress can have a negative effect is in our biology. The oldest part of our brain is charged with keeping us alive and when it comes across a situation that requires action, it pumps us full of adrenaline so that we can either fight or run away - the "fight or flight" response. When we fight or flee we burn through the adrenaline. The problem in our modern workplaces, is that neither fighting or fleeing are typically seen as appropriate responses, meaning the adrenaline stays within our systems.

Too much adrenaline in our systems can effect every part of our body from hair, brain, mouth, muscles, heart, lungs, digestive tract, reproductive organs to skin. The American Institute of Stress has information outlining the many manifestations of stress. 

Now consider a typical modern work-day where a constant stream of messages arrive demanding a portion of your attention and a response. For many information workers that stream of messages can appear never-ending and they may feel unable to keep up the incoming torrent. These are classic conditions for developing stress related conditions.

In our next blog we look at how we can be healthy in our work even with the ever increasing volumes of information being created in the world today.

 

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 23)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Email overload, Twitter updates, monster slippers... Top 10 ways to avoid distractions at work more
• Email Management Tips for Improved Productivity more
• Your Wheelhouse (In or Out of your Inbox) more
• Conquer Email Overload - Some Quick and Simple Solutions more
• Information Overload – Finding Balance On-Line more
• This Is What a Healthy Information Diet Looks Like more
• Dealing with "Information Overload" more
• Conquering Information Overload more
• Ending email overload more
• Have you got Goldfish Memory Syndrome? more

Statistics

• 53% of people believe that less than half the information they receive is valuable more

Wisdom

• Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.- Albert Einstein
• To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all - Oscar Wilde

 

 

INTEGRATION EVERNOTE: extending the power of Unified Inbox

The UIB team were regular users of Evernote, as our way of keeping our notes handy, searchable and shareable. We saw the potential to bring these qualities into our key working application - unifiedinbox.com

With the Evernote integration, our users can login once to UIB and see their Evernote folders along with their message folders. 

The work flow improvements we've seen so far from this integration:

• policies, procedures and instructions.  We save them in our Evernote notebooks and then any member of our team (whom we have given access to) can also view these notes.
• getting paper documents around the world.  Being a globally distributed team, on occasion, one office receives a paper document that needs to be commented on by a team member in another country.  The receiver scans the document into Evernote and then in UIB, assigns that note, along with comments to the recipient. The recipient finds this message in their inbox.
• making it easy to comment and ask questions about documents.  One of our team members has a notebook that they scan all their travel receipts into.  In UIB, the accountants have access to this notebook.  Whenever they have a question about an expense, they ask this question via the comments functionality, keeping the integrity of the original record intact.

We're sure there are more workflow improvements that the Evernote integration can offer and we look forward to finding them.  

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 20)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email more
• 11 Tips: Dealing with Information Overload more
• Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now more
• E-Hoarding Is Unhealthy more
• Managing Digital Information Overload – Is Technology The Cause & The Cure? more
• BlackBerry crumble reveals the depth of our email addiction more
• Top 10 Tricks for Dealing With Email Overload more
• Lightening the load on your email inbox: Five tips more
• The Secret to Avoiding Email Overload: Canned Responses more

Statistics

• 40% of Tablet and Smartphone Owners Use Them While Watching TV more
• Sheer overload” is reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, followed closely by “Finding and recovering past emails” and “Keeping track of actions. more
• 25% of all time spent online is devoted to social media more

Wisdom

• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending - Maria Robinson

 

 

October 20th is Information Overload Awareness Day

 

 - what steps will you take to reduce overload?

We would definitely recommend catching up with the advice given by the founders of Information Overload Awareness Day - this can be found here. Their challenge is to send 10% fewer emails on this day. 

For those still undecided on how to complete this challenge you may want to sign up for our Twitter series that has daily tips on how to manage in our information rich world.

You can find the collected series of tips, statistics and wisdom here in our regular blog.

And of course, there is always the option to sign-up for a month-long free trial of Unified Inbox - the product designed to keep information overload under control.

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 19)

As well as building the Unified Inbox  software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter :

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• How to stop e-mail overload? Think before you hit send... more
• 5 Tips to Beat Email Overload... more
• Dealing with e-mail is NOT a task... more
• In Praise Of Print Versions... more
• Adaptation and Loss... more
• A list of what not to do can be handy... more

Statistics

• 70% of respondents admitted to disrupting virtual meetings and webcasts to answer their mobile phone... more

Wisdom

• Life begins at the end of your comfort zone - Neale Donald Walsch
• Information is the seed for an idea, and only grows when it's watered. - Heinz V. Bergen 

Moments of stillness

Are your days spent rushing from one urgent ("the world will explode if you don't answer this email!") task to another? Are you finding that the urgent, not important, parts of your day are starting to take over from the important, not urgent?

If so, then your body is being subjected to constant adrenaline rushes.

You may be aware of adrenaline and its role in our survival - it's the "flight or fight" hormone.  A sabre tooth tiger appears and we either need to run fast and fight hard with that big stick. This activity then burns through the adrenaline.

The problem with our modern lives is that we're putting ourselves in situations where we flood with adrenaline but it is not socially acceptable to run or fight, allowing the adrenaline to build up in our bodies.

What solutions are there for handling the demands of modern worklife?

The most basic defence is to look after yourself, to ensure that your diet and exercise are sufficient to ensure a strong and resilient body.

The second level of defence is to train yourself to be active, rather than reactive. One of the training strategies for this is to take moments of stillness during your day.  

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future; live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

In Unified Inbox we built in our Wise Quotes to run on start-up. They are a reminder for us, that as we login to prepare for another day of running a software startup, to be still for a moment.  The ideal start to our days is when we approach our mail (generally considered a stressor task in modern overloaded lives) with a sense of calm, rather than a sence of trepidation.

Our quotes can also be accessed via our Twitter feed - we hope they make a difference to your day as well.

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 18)

As well as building the Unified Inbox software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter:

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Letter From Paris: 28 Days (Without the Internet) more
• 6 Ways to Stress Less About Your Email Inbox at Work more
• How to Fight Email Overload more
• From information overload and anxiety to peace and BEING ENOUGH more
• Work without E-mail: Is it Possible? more
• Dealing with the email overload more

Statistics

• Some 55 per cent of enterprises will have adopted cloud email and collaboration services (CECS) by 2020, more

Wisdom

• Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern recognition. -Marshall McLuhan

 

 

Standard work hours - do they still exist?

We blogged recently on the subject of work location and how the nature of work is changing - insofar as many people are no longer going to work each day in an office.

Now that technology changes have allowed "work" to take place at cafes, in cars and at home, we find that the definition of work time has also changed.

You may find that you or your co-workers work any of the following schedules

• nine to five - you are still required onsite in a certain location at certain hours
• job-share - a person is still required on-site at certain hours but you share that with someone else
• flexitime - the work can done at times that suit you, rather than fitting to the organisations schedule
• freelance - you decide what work needs to be done and when it needs to be done.

As long ago as 2005 - it was estimated that one third of workers participated in some way in the freelance economy.  And that figure is going up.

In the same way that our independence from location is fuelled by the rise of mobile devices and cloud based services, so is our independence from notion of office hours.  

There are different viewpoints on whether this change is for the better with some saying the productivity goes up when people choose their own work hours and some saying that stress levels increase without the structure of nine-to-five.

What is your opinion on changes in work hours - are they for the better?

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 17)

As well as building the Unified Inbox software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter:

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Managing Email Overload more
• Column: Fighting technology overload ... with an old cell phone more
• Cut the Noise and Cut to the Chase! more
• Irritating email habits and how to fix them more
• Bogged Down in Endless Emails and Reports? How to Deal with Information Overload more
• Dealing with Information Overload more
• Information Overload? Wear a Toilet Roll hat. more
• Commentary: Information overload a time killer more

Statistics

• 288,355 books published in 2009 in the US alone, as compared to 51,000 books 25 years ago. more
• Opening emails in mobile devices has jumped from 7% to 15% in one year more

Wisdom

• One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with. - Marshall McLuhan 

 

Getting great results from a team inbox

Increasingly businesses are starting to set up team inboxes for various functions in their business -  support@, marketing@ and sales@ are common uses.

The big benefit of a team inbox is that you don't need to worry that an important email is stuck in the mailbox of a staff member who is away sick.  And with a team structure for busy inboxes, more people can easily be allocated to clear backlogs.

Team inboxes are also used between PA and manager.  In this case, the PA can ensure that the more mundane emails are handled, leaving only the more important messages for the attention of the manager.

Unfortunately there is a downside to running a good team inbox.  Mesmo consultancy deals with this issue in a recent blog.  Here they identify emails being overlooked or answered twice as the key problems that businesses encounter when running a team inbox.

As we see it the key problem of emails being overlooked or answered twice is a problem of not knowing who is responsible for an individual message.  

In the Unified Inbox team inboxes every message is assigned to an individual team member for handling.  This team member can assign it to another team member with questions and have the message assigned back to them with the answer.  At all times, all the messages are visible in the inbox, so a team manager can be sure the inbox is being processed as it should.

Click here if you would like to trial Unified Inbox as your team inbox today.

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 16)

As well as building the Unified Inbox software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter:

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Toilus interruptus more  Graphic description of the interuptions many of us face in a working day.
• Cyberpunk Librarian: Dealing With Information Overload more Is deleting material unread bad?
• Information Overload Makes Us Dazed and Confused more
• Getting out from under information overload more
• Five Methodologies to Deal with Email Overload more Review of 5 well-publicised methods of dealing with overload
• My Single Most Powerful Productivity Trick more
• How Email Can Change Your Life more
• Top tips for dealing with information overload more 
• In praise of the good old stupidphone more
• Social Media Filtering: Avoiding Chaos and Losing Serendipity? more
• Replies to “Dealing with your cognitive load” – Part one of four more

Statistics

• $1.2 billion each: The hidden cost of people complexity to the top 200 more
• 31% of respondents admit to disrupting face-to-face meetings to answer their mobile phones. more
• In the last fifteen years, the incidence of ADD has increased more than 30 percent  more

Wisdom

• An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. - Gandhi 

 

 

How location dependant are you?

Do you leave your home in the morning and commute to the same physical workplace each day?  If so, you may have noticed that change is afoot.

The increasing availability of cloud computing and mobile devices means that defining work in terms of a physical location is a thing of the past for many people.  Their workplace is the spare room of the house, the car, a coffee shop or a clients office.

This change is demanding that we re-assess what we call work and where it happens.

In terms of work/life balance it was once easy to say if it happened at work, then it was work and everything else was personal.  But now we hear stories about people who answer their emails in bed and we know things have changed.

And while answering emails after-hours is often presented as a negative change, for many the freedom from hours of commuting is a major positive change that they have gained from becoming location-independent.

The ability to define boundaries (independent of location) will be a factor in how well we acclimatize to the new work environments. What positive and negative outcomes do see coming out of these changing work environments?

 

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 15)

As well as building the Unified Inbox software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter:

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• Email overload: Cut down on inbox clutter with these expert tips more
• In Defense of Distraction more It's long but well-worth the time put aside to read and absorb.
• Organizational Skills: How to Process Email and Deal with Information Overload more
• Email overload - getting people to respond more
• Overcoming information overload at work more
• Information meltdown.more Great updating graphic of the overload we are exposed to
• Curation Nation: The Rise of Content Entrepreneurs (Part 1) more

Statistics

• 41% of workers remain glued to their communication devices, sending instant messages; responding to texts; listening to voicemails; or checking their emails. more
• It would take exactly 68,636 tweets to reproduce Proust's most famous work. more

Wisdom

• Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. - Kofi Annan 

The leaders role in managing information overload

Jonathan Spira is one of the leading authorities on the subject of Information Overload in the world today. His book "Overload" is packed full of information on the subject and its cost to ordinary businesses.

In a recent blog he talked about the impact of Information Overload on leaders.  Here he talked about how his research showed that leaders in an organisation have only 5% of their day available for thought and reflection.  And that the biggest drain on a leaders time is information-overload related problems which take a full quarter of their day.

In a statement that seems to be at odds with modern managerial thought, he states that leaders need to reduce their information exposure, as a key portion of their role is to think and that this is the time they need to reclaim.  

He also states that leaders need to engage in how to anticipate, manage and reduce the ever increasing amounts of information that workers in the organisation are exposed to. They need to do this to avoid incurring the costs of Information Overload problems.  You can use his research to estimate the cost to your own organisation using this calculator.

It is analysis by people such as Jonathan Spira that led us to develop the Unified Inbox product as a way to handle the information deluge that has become a part of modern work-life.  If you would like to trial Unified Inbox for free, then check out the free monthly trial offer, and start putting control of information overload back into your own hands.

Curated Series - Tips, Stats and Wisdom (issue 14)

As well as building the Unified Inbox software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter:

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• quitting the internet aftermath: my plan more One womans plan that includes daily dance parties.
• Review: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, by Eli Pariser more
• Outsourcing your cognitive overload more
• Has Personalized Filtering Gone Too Far? more
• How to Avoid Information Overload – Separating Signal from Noise more
• This Week in Review: Is social media killing big ideas?. more
• Information Overload – Five Authors’ Points-of-View more
• Discovery Engines: Policing The Riot Of Information Overload more The next step on from a search engine.
• Is it information overload or complexity? more
• Struggling with information overload. more

Stats

• Every 60 seconds, more than twenty hours of video material is uploaded to YouTube more
• People require only 1.2 seconds on average to scan and assess the importance of an email more
• The Internet today contains in excess of 25 billion web pages on 110 million sites more

Wisdom

• Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience - Jonas Salk 

 

 

 

Decision fatigue - how big an impact can it have?

The New York Times recently published an excellent article entitled Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?  In this article they explored the fact that not all decisions we make are equally as good and these decisions can vary widely depending on how alert or fatigued we are.

The article starts with an exploration of a piece of research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  In this research the authors looked at what decisions judges made regarding parole for a series of prisoners.  They found that the time of day had a profound impact on whether the judges granted parole or not.  8.50am was a good time to appear before a judge, 4.25pm was a bad time.

"The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down."

This evidence pointed the researchers to the concept of decision fatigue.  That every decision we make, tires us, sometimes to the point where we choose to make the safest decisions.

"Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time."

The full article is lengthy but well worth reading to discover what we can do to be aware of this happening in our lives and what we are able to do to make the best decisions possible.

 

Curated Series - Tips, Statistics and Wisdom

As well as building the Unified Inbox software product , we are currently curating a Twitter series that focuses on information useful to people working with information.  If you would like to receive these daily - please follow us on Twitter:

• Tips for dealing with information and email overload
• Stats - all the numbers you ever wanted to see about email, internet and information
• Wisdom - because sometimes in amongst the information overload, we all need to take a step back and reflect.

Tips

• 5 Ways To Cut Email Overload. more
• Frying your brains on information overload: Old perspectives on a new issue. more
• Learning to Simplify and Control Email, RSS Feeds and Other Nonessential Materials. more
• Should you respond to every email. more - opinions from experts in the field.
• Email Overload – Where the CEO of Xerox and I disagree. more
• The E-Tool Bill of Rights. more

Statistics

• 1 billion tweets sent per week. more

Wisdom

• Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience. - Clarence Day 

 

INTEGRATION FACEBOOK:

While Facebook started as a dating tool for Harvard students and quickly became the personal social tool of choice, its businesses uses have also grown. For a business today to not to have a Facebook page is akin to not having a phone number.

Managing that Facebook page can be a challenge in it's own right. While Facebook is a crucial social app for a business to use – it is just one more in a long list of applications that a team has to manage.

At Unified Inbox we take the problem of “application overload” as seriously as it's more commonly known cousin “information overload”, so we included Facebook as one of the first social applications that we integrated into Unified Inbox.

Status updates from the inbox
Our Facebook page status updates are updated directly from within Unified Inbox. When a member of our team has something they want to share, they go through the same process as if they were sending an email.

Ensure messages are handled by best team member
When one of our followers sends us a message, that message arrives directly in our inbox which means it is then able to be assigned to any member of our team to work on and respond to.

Keep on top of wall posts, comments and likes
While we're working, any team member with the associated rights can check on our wall and comment or like any of the posts that our followers have made. The notifications of these posts comes into our inbox, so again it can be assigned to the most appropriate team member to respond.  

We like using Facebook through Unified Inbox because it means there is one less applicaton we have to have open on our desktop.  And given that Unified Inbox is accessible from any web-enabled device, our team are able to do this work anywhere.  If you'd like to trial this integration for free, then we have one month free trials on all our paid plans.  Sign-up here today!