Archive for the 'Individual Solutions' Category

Enounce MySpeed: a Highly Recommended Time Saving Tool

Posted on May 15th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The problem with video I am ambivalent about video instruction. On one hand, it adds a richness unavailable by other channels. On the other, it takes time to view – and, unless I need to learn how to perform emergency brain surgery, a written paragraph is faster to read by myself than watching a talking head read it to me. With text, you can skim and jump around – it’s a Random Access medium; video is inherently serial and limited by the average person’s verbal speed. With time an increasingly precious resource in our hectic age of information overload, wasting.. Read more

The Legitimacy – or Otherwise – of Ultra-brief Emails

Posted on April 18th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

A devious solution to email overload A friend pointed me to a post  that offered a simple and highly unusual solution to email overload: change the signature block on your desktop email client to read “Sent from my iPhone”. The idea, the writer explained, is that this will make you “feel more comfortable offering short, direct, and concise replies to incoming emails, thus improving your email productivity and freeing up time to do other more important work”. This is certainly devious, is probably effective, and the logic seems unassailable… but it raises a question: why would you need it? Surely.. Read more

How to Secure the Isolation You Need to Be Effective

Posted on April 10th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

The acclaimed American novelist Jonathan Franzen has an unusual way of ensuring he can concentrate and be creative. To quote the NY Times: Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. He did so in a Spartan studio … behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen … wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold. Kudos to the Franzen for being a touch typist, but here I want to focus on his statement: “It’s very, very hard to concentrate. You have to hold your mind free of all the clichés”… Read more

Radical Email Overload Solution: Batching Email Delivery

Posted on February 19th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

One of the worst causes of information overload is the constant arrival of email into the knowledge worker’s attention sphere. With new mail arriving every few minutes, people can never fully focus on their work. If they haven’t turned off the “you’ve got mail” alerts they are passively distracted; if they have, a sizable fraction of users still distract themselves by checking for new email every few minutes. What is needed is a way to prevent this checking. A radical email overload solution concept Over my years of helping companies fight information overload I’ve devised my share of original solutions;.. Read more

Reduce Information Overload Using Brilliant Email Etiquette

Posted on January 10th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Guest Post by Dr Monica Seeley Information overload and its sibling email overload continue to plague most business users.  Indeed although the latest figures for sick leave have been falling, the incidences of stress related illness have risen. Information overload and email overload are major contributors to stress related illness.   Our brains just cannot cope with the volume of information being  pushed at us, through email and now social technologies.  It has been suggested that we are now bombarded through these channels with the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day! In the case of email, a major problem is actually.. Read more

Why Disk Cleanup Matters, and How You Can Get It Done

Posted on January 4th, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

I suppose it’s because I’m a geek at heart, but I’m fascinated by the concept of disk cleanup… Why Disk Cleanup capability is important for you By Disk Cleanup I mean deleting unnecessary files from the Hard Disk on your own PC. Unnecessary can mean many things – obsolete system files, temporary files, corrupted files… but more importantly, user files, files you’ve saved to your disk in the past and no longer need. This may be because you have newer versions of them, or because you have duplicates of the same version in different folders, or because they’re safely stored.. Read more

How YOU Can Achieve Work/Life Balance in the Face of Information Overload

Posted on December 18th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Work/Life Balance and Email: an irreconcilable contradiction? We all know the facts (if you don’t, check out my articles). Your typical knowledge worker receives 50 – 300 email messages daily of which 30% are useless, and spends some 20 hours a week dealing with them (The Israel Internet Association passed out a survey before my lecture there the other day, and the results affirm these facts once again). These numbers mean that people are trying to overcome their overflowing Inbox around the clock, including evenings, nights, weekends and vacations. Any pretense at Work/Life Balance has disappeared with the arrival of.. Read more

How You Can Deploy “Quiet Time” to Increase Your Group’s Productivity

Posted on December 13th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

When I speak to knowledge workers about solving information overload, I mention some fairly hi-tech solutions: software products that prevent, reduce or help combat the infoglut they all struggle with. And while those are useful, some of the most effective solutions are entirely lo-tech. I already wrote here about No Email Day; let me now tell you about the solution called Quiet Time. How to disconnect and (maybe) win a Nobel prize As everyone knows, William Shockley won a Nobel Prize  as one of the team that invented the Point Contact Transistor at Bell Labs. As many don’t know, he.. Read more

Crafting Effective PowerPoint Presentations: Food for Thought

Posted on December 10th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

In a previous post I promised you to write about how to craft great PowerPoint presentations. I was planning to give you a list of “do this, do that” tips, but I found myself thinking about some underlying factors that make a slide presentation effective (or not). This turned out much more interesting than just a list of tips, so I’ll share my conclusions with you as food for thought. The conclusions pretty much agree with the way I write presentations for my lectures; I will give you some pointers at the end. Do you really need a “Great PowerPoint.. Read more

How to Write Terrible PowerPoint Presentations

Posted on November 8th, 2012 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Microsoft’s PowerPoint can be a blessing or a curse.  Either way, it is an inseparable part of our business environment (though you do occasionally run into a presenter with the skill and self-assurance to avoid PowerPoint presentations altogether). The trick is to make your PowerPoint presentations into effective tools that you wield to achieve your goals, rather than the converse. I’ve been using PowerPoint for almost two decades, and have seen it used endlessly by others. I still use it today in my public speaking role, where it’s imperative that it do good. And it never ceases to amaze me.. Read more