Mathemagenic

As a result of having less time to blog and increasing stress levels my blogging routines went broken:

Then I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

The social filtering mechanisms of weblogs and content delivery by RSS feeds are usually praised for their efficiency in allowing keeping up with many information sources, in my case a weblog-induced information overload became a reality. There are a few reasons for it:

Growing network. A relatively small circle of early-adopters writing about knowledge management and learning exploded over time, as more smart people started to blog.

Multidisciplinary blogging. My blogging reflects my interests in bridging multidisciplinary boundaries, so while I started mainly on KM and learning, it eventually turned into “personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance” and lots of other topics. Over time this got me into a contact with a diverse group of other bloggers.

RSS overload. There were periods of 1000+ subscribers to my RSS feed, but even without trying to keep up with all of them my weblog reading list grew to more than 200 weblogs and was a challenge to keep up.

Need to converge. Expansion of my weblog network and growing amount of potentially useful information coming through it came at the moment where my dissertation ideas started to converge. At that moment reducing information intake and the degree of engagement with others was essential for processing emerging insights and integrating them into a bigger whole. Reducing time spent reading other weblogs reflected at micro-level the suggestion to “stop reading and start writing” often given to PhD students struggling to incorporate recent publications in their work.

While the withdrawal from frequent and engaged blogging was a reflection of my personal and work circumstances at that period, the main challenge was adjusting my (blog-related) information processing strategies and habits. I can imagine that at a better moment I would be able to do it, but then I was simply trying to keep up and eventually gave up: I just stopped reading blogs systematically.

In turn, writing suffered:

• Since I wasn’t reading others, writing was stimulated mainly by my own thinking and work. Although I can’t check it fast, I can imagine that the amount of outgoing links dropped dramatically.
• I wasn’t seriously following on the feedback of others on what I wrote, so potential conversations died at birth. I can also imagine that for others it was less interesting to link and to comment to someone who wasn’t very responsive.
• At the end writing wasn’t much about engaging, but more about just putting things “out there”.

When Radio stopped working in January 2008, it was easy to take an extended break from blogging (additionally motivated by the fact that it was a natural point to “freeze” weblog archive to analyse it for my dissertation).

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Another turn on ‘E-mail is where knowledge goes to die’ and that blogs could solve the problem, but it’s not easy to ’sell’ to managers (Andy, thanks for the pointer). And a very good comment by Tony Karrer:

I’ve seen a few other places that advocate this, BUT, how do you address the fact that email is relatively more of a push technology. In other words, in today’s corporate world, someone is more likely to read an email than an update to a web page.

Given my own blogging experiences I believe that this issue has to be taken seriously. There are a couple of reasons for that:

First, email serves many functions. Next to being a tool for communication, it could work reminder for to-dos, organiser of work and even turn into habitat at work (for those who want more - look at email management research and studies that touch email as part of personal information management research).

Suggesting that (part of) email communication should be replaced by blogging without taking into account those functions is likely to break existing personal information management practices of people. This could result in decreased personal productivity next to increased organisational productivity with questionable net gain.

Second, before we discuss increased organisational productivity as a result of (part of) personal email archives available on intranet we need to make sure that those bits will actually be found and used by others. And this is not that easy…

With email you have to deal with mainly with your own inbox. It’s already much of an email overload, since next to those really important ‘to do’ emails you are likely to have ‘FYI’ emails on things that might be interesting, ‘corporate spam’ (saw the term recently, don’t remember where) that you may not need at all, but someone in a company thinks that you need, personal emails and lots of other things. Or, using distinctions in my previous post, it includes things that don’t fit that are often difficult to process.

Now just imagine that next to your own mailbox you have access to mailboxes of others. The amount of things that don’t fit increases dramatically. The good side of it that it’s a source of unexpected insights, it’s searchable, it’s archived company-wide forever. The bad thing is that we are not equipped to deal with it.

Now to my personal example. When I started blogging I loved it. Reading others brought all those unexpected insights and relationships that improved my work dramatically. However, it also brought heavy information overload that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. Having many (more than I could ever imagine) bits of potentially useful insights with no immediate way to process them made me feeling stressed and lost. I am a bit better now, but it’s still not working well and I still envy Ton who not only wrote about need for new information processing strategies, but also figured out how those could work for himself (check his posts on filtering, tools and routines).

So, I’d suggest that before evangelising blogs as an alternative to email we should figure out how people in a company are going to process increased amounts of available and potentially useful information when it comes out from hidden email archives. Otherwise we risk of moving a big chunk of information from email that at least read to a company-wide intranet that many people learnt to ignore (unless that important document is announced by an email from CEO).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/24.html#a1805; comments are here.

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Must read: BusinessWeek’s The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard… (via Ingo Forstenlechner).

It’s on many things: long working ours, information overload, overheads of unnecessary communication, social network profiling, knowledge mapping, an even blogs and wikis… A bit too much to mix, but definitely along the lines of the work we do, my PhD research and my personal struggles.

And a quote about things that I believe are behind many of those issues - knowledge work governance and knowledge worker flexibility:

…in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. “The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death,” says Babson’s Davenport. “Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office.”

Of course, there’s one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry — all that’s seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/29.html#a1679; comments are here.

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I used to blog papers I read, but over last few months it wasn’t that much. Here is one from yesterday:

Neustaedter, C., Brush, A., and Smith, M., (2005) “Beyond “From” and “Received”: Exploring the Dynamics of Email Triage.” CHI 2005 Short Papers.

Abstract. Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs for email triage. The results suggest the need for email user interfaces to provide additional socially salient information in order to bring important emails to the forefront.

Of course I didn’t know the word triage and I was surpised that to find out that it is “a process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment” (more details at Wikipedia).

The paper is 4 pages, so you can get an impression of the main findings byt yourself, but there are a couple of things that I find pretty much corresponding with the insights from interviews on information overload we did at work.

What we found most interesting was that the interview participants using the multi-pass strategy would routinely use a first pass to handle emails they consider to be not important or junk. This pass would involve finding emails they could quickly delete or get rid of.

We didn’t look at email handling directly, but it comes heavily while talking about information overload. When talking about their email handling strategies several people noted the same. I wonder why. I guess next to the fact that getting rid of not important stuff is easy, but probably also because endorphin release upon completing the task :)

But what I’ve also heard from our participants that sometimes cleaning and organising emails takes so much time that, although properly sorted, important emails do not get much time to be read or acted upon…

The second thing from the paper is one of the recurrent themes, not only in this interview round, but also in other studies on whatever technology for communication and knowledge sharing.

Regardless of the user type, we found that most people felt their strategy was pretty good, but realized there were likely other, more efficient strategies.

What I find out often that technology training people get are often stops at a level of functionality (”if you want to send email click this button”), while usually there is not much discussion about productivity, your own and others (”think before emailing - may be a colleague is next door and would actually enjoy a coffee break instead of one more message in a mailbox”). We are often taught how to use tools for what they designed, but not how to use them to make our life easier and more fun.

Anyway, what would be practical implications of it? Apart of reshaping existing technology trainings I’m thinking of ways to share personal effectiveness tricks and establishing shared communication practices that make life of everyone easier. Those probably could help, but then there are questions about starting the process:

• moving out of your own comfort zone (”if it doesn’t break don’t touch it”)
• finding ways to talk to others about practices which are usually hidden in our personal interactions with tools
• getting convinced that there is a value in comparing personal effectiveness tricks (this is a big issue - it’s easy to say “do it like me”, but most likely answer is “it doesn’t fit because I organise my work differently”) and figuring out how to pick up something that could be useful in spite of differences

Of course, you can design better tools, but I’m not convinced it would help - many times it’s not about having a good instrument, but about knowing how to use it in a good way :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/06/23.html#a1593; comments are here.

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Just a concept map from information overload workshop. It’s a bit drafty… May be Carla will make a nicer copy (I sent this one to her for our project). Or may be I’ll find time to blog it properly…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/22.html#a1530; comments are here.

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From today’s workshop on information overload:

• my presenation (on two things: (1) connecting PKM and information overload, (2) some relevant input from personal information management research)
• Information strategies: exposure, channels, tools
• Information “properties”

• knowledge (value/relevance/etc.) - information (artefacts) - “meta-data” - “meta-meta-data” (Ton’s forest)
• categorised/not
• useful/not
• hot - warm - cold

[I wanted to add more things, it's not working that way, so just posting from drafts]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/03.html#a1513; comments are here.

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After first steps in our research on information overload things get a bit more clear for me: it seems that it’s not about information overload, but our practices of dealing with information. Questions I find particularly interesting:

• How do you manage multitasking? Strategies, tips and tricks to handle multiple processes…
• How do you manage working with multiple sources needed for a task? Especially when there are a lot of them and they are in different formats (emails, files, paper documents, IM talks, coffee-table discussions).
• How do you manage awareness? How do you monitor multiple sources of information that could be useful in the future? (I use weblogs :)

Would be nice to find time to describe my own practices regarding those :)

Funny enough, those questions correspond with process, artefact and awareness categories from my thinking on PKM purposes and practices.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/23.html#a1505; comments are here.

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Intel IT research white paper Information Overload: Inaccessible Data and a Knowledge Management Solution (bold is mine)

Problem: lack of project data accessibility

Date collection: semi-structured interviews (questionnaire is included) with users of project documents at different organisational levels and job functions

Inhibitors of finding documents

• Many document repositories exist. “Different groups used these repositories in different fashions and without a consistent process for depositing documents in any of the repositories”.
• Lack of communication about “where the documents were stored and what other document repositories exist”.
• Current location of a document is not known.
• “Information was not well archived with proper revision controls, resulting in the original version of the documents often being inaccessible and sometimes nonexistent”.
• Documents are mailed around and not posted to a common repository.
• Users rely on finding people involved in the project to find project information. These people could be busy or hard to find.
• Documents could be too long to be useful.

Impact

• Waste of paper, disk space and time
• Rework because of (1) changed, but not communicated requirements, or (2) inconsistent interpretation of requirements
• “In general people tended to share information only at its end state, when it was ready for consumption, and not during discovery” -> duplication of efforts
• Searching results in a significant loss of time
• “The difficulty in accessing the right information created a new behaviour trend for some users: They sought out information in meetings”
• “When documents were not easily accessible, users could get only a snapshot of the environment unless they knew whom to ask. To resolve this problem, specific groups or projects established unique processes to address this problem”.

Findings

• User segmentation is number one priority
• Different user needs regarding depth of the document (management summary vs. data about reasons for a specific decision made before). Two user segments were identified: “technical expertise” and “support and environment”.
• “Interviewees rarely had an inclusive picture of the different ways the project documents were used”
• Proposed user segmentation for further investigation: role or job function, prior experience, geographical location.

Recommendations

• Understanding users with the proposed segmentation
• Improving finding documents
  • Single repository with revision control and posting process + discipline to follow it
  • Adding metadata to documents
• Improving finding information in documents
  • Executive summaries
  • Using knowledge discovery in databases (=summary extraction)
  • Adding unique metadata tag to a specific piece (e.g. project requirement), so it’s possible to follow it through different documents

Hmm… It’s good as an example, but I wouldn’t call it “KM solution” :)

What is more interesting is look how people adapt to the situation: start relying more on meetings or on personal contacts. I guess that document searching behaviour should be studied together with informal communication (see public vs. private discussions), so at the end one can arrive to the solution that combines strengths of both sides.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/19.html#a467; comments are here.

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