My Writings. My Thoughts.
ILM research shows one third of UK workers work while on holiday
// July 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // BlackBerry
The Institute of Leadership & Management’s recent press release is very revealing about the state of UK workers’ relationships with holiday and leisure. A third work in some way while on holiday while 80% frequently respond to emails. 40% feel more stressed when they get back.
A lot of this is because of the normalised behavour of keeping on top of your emails via BlackBerry even during your holiday. The reseach says that two thirds check emails at least once a day. For some, this is less stressful than facing an inbox running into four figures when you get back. For others, it will be the unbreakable habit of compulsive checking and the anxiety of not knowing what messages are careering around the company.
The end result of all this is that people are not getting the benefit of being on holiday and their families’ scarce time away is diminished by the pull of emails. In the US, they are inevitably a couple of years ahead of us and the phrase “Shrinking Vacation Syndrome” has already entered the lexicon to reflect the trend towards missing holidays altogether. This has to be a damaging trend for personal resilience, work life balance and family life.
Speaking of research, I am conducting my own study as part of my MSc into the relationship between BlackBerry use and workplace stress, something that has not been done as a quantitative academic study before. I welcome indivdual respondents to the brief online survey which can be found here. I am also keen to recruit organisations for whom I am prepared to do a complimentary bespoke version of the survey. Please get in touch separately if you’s like to pursue this
Take Part in Info Overload Survey and Win Dilbert CubeGuard Blockers
// July 13th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
I have been working for a few months now with the magnificent Information Overload Research Group whose members and steering group are mostly in the US. They pull together a wealth of great information about info overload. One of the sponsoring organisations, Basex, has set up a survey about what happens during the knowledge worker’s day – the results will be published on Information Overload Day in September.
Read more about the survey on the Basex blog and take the survey here.
“The Cult of Busyness” and the lonely society
// July 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
The Mental Health Foundation recently published its report “The Lonely Society”, available here. It is well worth a read as it is a really good analysis of the combined impacts of the way we work today and the way we socialise via electronic means. It appears that – both at home and at work – we are all to busy contacting one another to actually communicate.
One paragraph struck a chord with me particularly so I quote it in full:
“…socialising and investing time in social ties are generally seen as less important than “productive” activities like work. Writing about loneliness in 21st century America, Harvard professors of psychiatry Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz refer to the ‘cult of busyness’ that has become a modern badge of honour. They suggest that we face so much pressure to be ‘productive’ that we neglect ‘unnecessary’ relationships that are as vital as food and water. Long working hours are frequently cited as having a negative impact on family life. For many people, working long hours is a necessity to support their families, rather than a choice. “
Why is it irritating to hear one half of a mobile conversation?
// June 2nd, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized
Some research just published in Psychological Science suggests we find it harder to screen out someone’s conversation when we can only hear one side. The team at Cornell University got teams to do a number of conversation tasks while listening to both two-sided and one-sided conversations. They made more errors when listening to one-sided conversations. So, if you’ve ever felt irritated by the conversation on the tube home about someone’s plans to have Marks and Spencer lasagne and a bottle of wine in front of a DVD when they get home, it’s because your brain is trying to fill in the missing part of the conversation. Even if it’s as mundane as whether the DVD should be Mama Mia or Sex in the City…
What the research does not offer any explanation for is this natural curiosity that the brain has for “information” just beyond its reach. My feeling is that it’s the same impulse that makes us want to check each email as it comes in. It’s “gossip” which in our ancestral environment might have been a crucial nugget of information about something fundamental to our survival. Our brain has not yet caught up with the idea that it might just be about someone else’s frozen lasagne.
Sync my BlackBerry with my BMW?
// May 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // BlackBerry
Such is the demand from customers to eliminate all remaining aspects of life where it is not possible to receive email messages, BMW and RIM have joined forces to allow BMW drivers to see their inbox from the iDrive panel in their car. It’s a clever use of Bluetooth and you can see a demo of it on the Information Week blog here.
If you’re at all concerned about road safety, fear not as email messages are only displayed in full when the car is stationary. Once you are on the move, you can only see “From” and “Subject” – you then get the email read to you by a computerised voice. I for one think this is still a bit worrying from a road safety perspective – people taking their eyes off the road to look at their sat nav or radio generally do so at moments of their choosing. If you are overtaking on the fast lane of a motorway and, out of the corner of your eye, you see a new email from your boss with “URGENT!!!” as the subject, you may be fatally distracted as you reach for the “read” button.
Would you be happy about your child being given a lift in a car of which the driver was checking their email in this way?
30% of Employees in the US Feel the Need to Stay Connected 24/7
// April 22nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
This survey by conferencing firm InterCall was covered in the New York Times yesterday. Among the other interesting findings were: that 25% of workers think their supervisors expect them to be online and connected after hours; that 15% expect to attend at least one work-related call or web meeting during their next vacation; and 17% say that it is frowned upon if they don’t connect to work during their vacations.
I wonder what a similar survey would find in the UK. As for the requirement to be connected 24/7 being driven by bosses, my experience is that it is more multi-faceted than that. People I know that stay connected on holiday often say they do so as it is less stressful than wondering about the thousands of emails building up for their return. So the relationship between email and stress has become double-edged since people are often more stressed when on holiday and without access to email – hence, the rationalisation of tackling them before returning to work.
For me, the trend here is worrying – I doubt anybody achieves anything particularly impactful from their holiday. All they are doing is hindering their work-life balance and their resilience to stress with ultimate consequences for them, their familay and their employer.
Tetris for Trauma Victims? – Implications for Multitasking
// March 29th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload
Friday’s Telegraph had a really interesting piece on some research by a team at Oxford University – the original research paper is well worth a read.
The team took 40 guinea pigs and subjected them to a harrowing 12-minute video of death and injury – this is apparently a standard analog for post-traumatic stress disorder. After a 30 minute break, half sat quietly while the other half…. …played Tetris. All kept a diary for a week and the Tetris players had significantly fewer flashbacks than the control group.
Why? Because the brain has only “limited visuospatial working memory resources” to consolidate experiences as memories and Tetris is, apparently, a great way of soaking up those resources at the expense of other – in this case harmful – cognitive activities. So, as an alternative to drugs or cognitive behaviour therapy, this is being viewed as a potential treatment for PTSD sufferers.
But turn the idea on its head for a minute. What intrigues me about this is the brain’s powerful ability to constrain its own activity if multiple demands are made on its resources. For me it’s another powerful argument against attempting to multitask.
Microsoft markets Bing as “cutting through information overload”
// March 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload
Interesting positioning from Microsoft for Bing, its search engine to rival Google. According to Marketing Week, here’s how UK MD Ashley Highfield describes the TV advertising campaign they are launching in the UK this week:
“The ad campaign brings to life the concept of Bing as a decision engine, a tool that both cuts through the information overload and offers a new search experience. We’re confident that this will help grow our user base, offering advertisers an alternative search solution.”
As someone who watches almost no commercial TV (and what I do watch is recorded so I can fast-forward through the ads), I am genuinely interested in seeing this ad. It’s the first time since Xerox’s 2007 viral video that I can think of a technology vendor using “information overload” as part of the selling proposition in an above-the-line campaign. In fact, the only other instance I can think of is Xobni in their sales material for the enterprise version of their inbox plug-in.
Is this a cynical exercise on Microsoft’s part – tapping into the information overload zeitgeist – or is the company genuinely trying to demonstrate it is dealing with the issue? Certainly, Outlook 2010 has a number of new features that will help customers manage email better. If this is a trend, it is a welcome one. With past innovations such as the red flag and four different ways of letting you know a new email had arrived, there is some lost ground to recover on this one…
“Shorter working week inevitable” – really?
// February 18th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload
The New Economics Foundation put out a release on Saturday calling for a 21 hour week. Part of the rationale is that this would help address “lasting damage to the economy caused by the banking crisis”. What this utopian suggestion forgets is that the banking crisis was partly caused by homeowners mortgaging themselves to the hilt. That issue has not gone away so I can’t see hard-pressed homeowners voluntarily cutting their hours in order to help “distribute paid work” a bit more evenly or reduce their carbon footprint. Most need all the paid work they can get.
NEF is right in two areas – the country is becoming increasingly polarised and those in work are working ever longer hours. It reports that since 1981, two-person households have added 6 hours to their work week. As everybody will be asked to do more with less, this trend will continue upwards.
It is odd that nobody talks about the “Leisure Society” any longer. When the Edwardians stopped factory work on Saturday afternoons, professional football took off. Saturday working for manual workers stopped altogether in the 1950s when Churchill seriously thought he might be able to introduce a 4-day week for the working man. In 1981, when NEF base their research, I was a schoolboy working in a warehouse near Moorgate during my summer holidays and remember the foreman telling me authoritatively that we would all get Friday afternoons off before long.
So what happened? Firstly, those manufacturing jobs aren’t there anymore. We are increasingly becoming a nation of knowledge workers – the FT on Monday mentioned an IDC report which suggests that in 5 years’ time, only 10 percent of EU jobs will not require IT skills. (That warehouse in Moorgate is now a financial business of some sort – I walked past it the other day and a fleet of drivers in silver Mercs was waiting outside).
What’s happened over the last 20 years is that knowledge workers have begun to use new communications technologies such as email, mobiles, BlackBerrys etc. Paradoxically, we use these tools in such a way as to wind up working longer hours and carry our work increasingy into our home lives.
Taming Technology and doing more with less
// February 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload
Stefan Stern wrote a really excellent piece in last week’s FT in which he observes that “more with less” may become a management mantra. He makes the point that the real challenge is taming technology, establishing boundaries for its use and recognising that we will not achieve more with less if we are “always on”, 24/7.
I love his anecdote about someone posting on her Facebook page: “So much to do, so little time”.. Only to receive a prompt post reading: “Get off Facebook then.”
Read the article here.
