Month: January 2007

There have been a few articles over the last couple of days dealing with the issue of information overload and interruptions – this apparently now has a name: informania.

The dictionary definition doesn’t quite seem to line up with the definition given in this article. There definition is this:

“infomania” — the loss of concentration caused by the constant electronic interruptions that plague many office workers.

The other interesting article is this one created by Dan Russell over on Creating Passionate Users.

I resonate strongly with both of these articles. If I turn on everything that could be screaming for my attention it makes for quite a list:

• Mobile phone – calls
• Mobile phone – messages
• Office/House phone
• Instant Messaging – personal (Live Messenger)
• Instant Messaging – corporate (Sametime)
• Calendar (Notes)
• Tasks (Notes)
• Email – personal (Outlook)
• Email – corporate (Notes)
• VOIP (Skype)
• Blogs (Feedburner)

And that’s without including all of the external distractions, or any interruptions from biological interrupters (people).

It’s a wonder I ever get to do anything other than deal with the interrupts. But I’ve learnt a lesson, a switch some of them off. It’s amazing how liberating it is.

Dan’s recognition of the “setup time” between interruptions is spot-on. There are some days when I feel worn-out by all of the context switches.

I think we have a long way to go before we really understand how to attract peoples eye-attention to the correct thing at the correct time. We need to think a lot harder about the impact of the technology that we are making available and the way that it influences the user experience.

People on a conference call behave differently to those on who are face-to-face in a meeting room. We all know this to be true.

• We are more likely to interrupt someone who we can look at.
• We are more likely to have side conversations in Instant Messaging when we are on a conference call. It’s rude to do it in a face-to-face meeting.
• We are more forgiving of people losing attention in a conference call. No I don’t know why, but we are.
• We are more likely to make decisions in a face-to-face meeting.

But what about the situation where there is a mix, which behaviour dominates.

I’m speculating here about where the line is, I think the line probably moves depending on the personalities. What I’m not speculating about is that there is a line, there is a point where the practices change from one mode to the other.

Where the flip gets interesting is that the flip from “conference call mode” to “face-to-face mode” is an exclusive one. “Conference call mode” includes everyone, “face-to-face mode” excludes people on the phone. You have to be a very strong character to dominate a face-to-face meeting if you are on the phone. Even if you are able to dominate, you actually remove some of the value from the face-to-face members of the meeting. All of the people who are face-to-face will have to work the way a conference call works. If you are face-to-face and working in “conference call mode”, what’s the point of being face-to-face?

I’ve witnessed these effects a few times. On one occasion I had to give a regular briefing to a large team. Half the team were in the same location I was, the other half were on the phone. I used to have to close my eyes to make sure that I wasn’t communicating by gesture to those people around me and excluding the people on the phone.

On another occasion I was in a face-to-face meeting and there was only one person on the phone. This meeting had a few sessions. It the start of each session we would acknowledge the existence of the person on the phone and then completely ignore them for the next hour.

I suppose that what I am saying is this:

• If some of the people in the meeting are going to be on the phone, and they are going to be included, there is little point in the rest of the people meeting face-to-face.
• If there is only going to be one person on the phone, they may as well not bother, they aren’t going to add any value.
• Face-to-face mode will win, it’s a very powerful force.

I’ve drawn the line as progressively changing, and I’m not sure that is correct. I think it may just be a straight flip – “conference call mode” to “face-to-face mode”. I’m not sure what the middle ground looks like. I certainly don’t think that it’s the best of both worlds, it’s more likely to be the lowest common denominator. It’s probably going to be very frustrating for the people meeting face-to-face. When it comes to the time for making decisions, for instance, the people meeting face-to-face will be able to make an agreement between themselves far more easily than the people on the conference call.

I’d prefer it that we didn’t call both of these things “meetings” because they are different types of event. I’d also like there to be more research on behaviours in the two modes and training for people. We train people as meeting facilitators, so why not train people to be conference call members?

Andy Piper left an interesting comment on my previous File Server post:

Interesting discussion. Appreciate that this is mostly aimed at the enterprise.

So, how successful do you think the new Windows Home Server product will be? And should we all just use Amazon S3 instead?

I’ve run a Linux server at home for many years, but in terms of file storage I just can’t get myself to move over to a server-based model at home. The Linux box handles e-mail, an Apache server, DNS etc. and there are some shares on there, but I just don’t use them very much.

This got me thinking about the influence of the consumer experience on the file server, and the chance that other technologies will replace a significant part of these capabilities.

I’m unlikely to have SharePoint (or any other similar technology) at home so will use some form of file service, either local or server based.

We are increasingly finding ourselves in a position where the consumer experience drives the enterprise experience. So if the SharePoint type of technology is going to be successful it needs to answer questions within the enterprise space that are different to the questions being asked by consumers. If the technology is answering questions for which the consumer already has a solution they are going to favour the consumer solution.

One recent example of this phenomena has been desktop search. Many consumers have installed a desktop search product on their PC at home, I have then been on the receiving end of people requesting the same on their work PC.

So how does this influence the file system?

People are dealing with far more data on their home PC than on their work PC, so why shouldn’t they just do at work what they already do at home? What’s going to make them do something different at work?