It’s less than three weeks to Overloaded 2014, IORG’s June 7 conference in San Francsico. I’m going – are you? Have you registered yet? I was discussing email overload solutions with a team of managers and we were considering how to differentiate urgent messages, when one guy asked: What is an urgent message? And who decides it’s urgent, anyway? Now, that is a deceptively simple question, one well worthy of some thought. What do we mean by Urgent? Although people seem to have a gut feeling of what “Urgent” means, once you open it for discussion you get different viewpoints… Read more

An uncalled for dissonance As you know I lecture often on Information Overload in organizations, and I describe in these lectures the manifold damages of email overload in a workplace setting, followed by the available remedies. To my surprise, I sometimes encounter an indignant response: people declare that email is a vital tool, and I’m wrong to declare war on it! This always catches me by surprise, because my battle is with the abuse and misuse of email, not with the tool itself; and I’ve certainly never called for abandoning email – I benefit from its use as much as.. Read more

When technology hits a wall One thing about any mainstream technology: it can get so successful that it runs into a wall, and then another technology takes over. Take horse power: this worked great for millennia, but by the end of the 19th century there were hundreds of thousands of horses in New York City alone, and the manure they produced on the streets was becoming a huge problem. The issue was resolved only when the automobile was invented and took over (not, one may note, without creating its own environmental issues later on – and we’re waiting for the.. Read more