Surviving Information Overload
Email: 1579 inbox items. 998 unread. 400 more incoming by end of day.
Voicemail: 12 messages, 7 of them new. And the phone is ringing.
Calendar: booked solid from 8:30 AM to 6:00 PM in 30 and 15 minute segments.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Now imagine pumping all of that — the email, the phone calls, the meeting reminders — through a desktop PC, a laptop, a Pocket PC, and a mobile phone. And add ubiquitous high bandwidth wireless connectivity so that you can be online all the time. Every. Single. Second.
Sound familiar now? For your sake, I hope not. But if you work in a knowledge-based job and use so-called “productivity” tools like email, voicemail, task lists and calendars to channel your workflow, this almost certainly rings a bell. I keep bumping into people who work in these sorts of “information overload” environments, and their struggles are much the same.
Below I’ve compiled some recommendations on how to survive in an information overload environment. This is a collection of techniques I learned over time from the workmates I most admired at Microsoft: the 1% slice of engineers, researchers, designers, marketers, admin assistants, and executives who were at the top of their game in quality, productivity, and work-life balance. I used their tactics daily to stay afloat.
To be clear, I’m not offering a magic wand for fixing overload situations in their entirety. In most workplaces the overload problem stems directly from the structure of the jobs, the collaboration methodology, and the number of hours you’re expected to put in. There’s no magic cure for that, short of re-engineering the corporate culture from top to bottom. I’m writing instead about what you can do on an individual level to retain your sanity, maximize productivity, and have more fun.
#1: Eliminate Interruptions
That means the “bling!” noises and popup windows and phone rings and myriad other silly widgets that signify status changes, meeting reminders, and the arrival of new messages. Turn that crap off. It distracts you from the task at hand, annoys people around you, and elevates your stress level by keeping you in a constant state of alert. Set the taskbar to autohide and reconfigure your productivity apps to stop harassing you.
Don’t worry; you can always flip all the bells and whistles back on later if you get lonely. But once your sanity starts ebbing back, you probably won’t want to. 95% of those interruptions are needless distractions. Eliminate them.
#2: Archive Aggressively
This rule is also known as “keep a clean work surface”. Find everything on your physical and virtual desktops and in your email that’s stale –- items you haven’t touched in the last 3 weeks, let’s say -– and file it in a set of reference folders.
Really, go ahead, do it now. You’ll feel much better.
For instance, I use Outlook to manage email and Windows to manage documents. In Outlook I have a small number of folders, one for each active project. I also have an archive that contains my old mail. Similarly in the My Documents folder I have a handful of folders, one for each project I’m actively working on, and then a “Reference” folder that contains reams of old stuff that I rarely need to look at. The archives keep all the old stuff out of sight and out of mind.
Again, don’t worry; you can always dig out all that junk later if you need it. But 95% of the time, you won’t. And with desktop and intranet search tools, you can always find something if you really need to. So archive it. Your archive is for reference material; your work surface is for active projects.
#3: Chunk Everything into Projects
It’s easy to fragment your concentration by treating tasks and messages as a swarm of unrelated bits and pieces. Sadly, most productivity tools push us further and faster down this slippery slope. (Public enemy number one in this regard: e-mail.) These tools are the fast path to overload, because they make it so easy to bombard each other with hundreds if not thousands of documents, emails, phone calls, tasks, and meetings. We end up with too many disparate things to concentrate on, and inevitably start to thrash or enter a state of analysis paralysis.
There’s no surprise here. Humans just aren’t good at focusing on lots of things at once. One way to get around this is to aggregate all tasks and messages into a small number of projects. Then treat every item as part of a project.
It sounds simplistic, and it is. But if you can do this successfully, then projects become a useful primary pivot for your thinking, as follows:
- Schedule your time at the project level, not the task or message level
- Structure your day so that you work on one and only one project at a time
- Work in contiguous blocks that are of optimal length for your personal productivity. (Do you work better in 15 minute chunks or 50 minute chunks? Experiment to figure it out, and then chunk your work that way.)
I find about five projects is a reasonable upper limit for me; more than that and I’m back in the same trap of too many things to focus on. This relates closely to a particular philosophy I aspire to live by: do a small number of things really well, rather than many things with mediocrity. (Hey, give me a break; I said it’s an aspiration.)
A common objection to projects is that they just mask the underlying complexity, and ultimately one must still deal with all the nasty individual bits and pieces. Granted, the complexity still exists. But masking that complexity is the whole point: projects help you avoid getting bogged down in the details, and give you a nice clean structure for managing your time, energy, and priority tradeoffs. Which leads us to…
#4: Prioritize
Once you’ve arranged your work into projects you can ask three useful questions: (1) What is the relative order of prioritization? (2) Which projects need more time, or less time? (3) Which ones can you starve or drop entirely, so that you can carve out time to take on new, higher-priority commitments?
This little mantra is incredibly useful, both as an internal mental conversation and with work colleagues. Repeat as necessary.
#5: Filter
What to do with the onslaught of incoming stuff? Filter it, like this:
- Assign each incoming task and message to a project.
- Screen out the stuff that isn’t in your list of committed projects.
- If you don’t own something, hand it off to the person who does.
- Deal with the under-30-second items immediately. Add all longer items to a project, for later action that you schedule into your calendar.
- Try to touch each item only once (to read it, delete it, route it, or file it).
This is straight out of Getting Things Done, for the most part. It works. In particular, check out the free workflow diagrams, available here.
Repeat the filtering routine once in a while, but as a scheduled task, not a continously running activity. Filtering your email every 5 minutes while you’re in a meeting or a conversation just fragments your attention. Which leads us to…
#6: Be Fully Present
Think about the last time you were in a meeting or a conversation with several other people. Was everyone really there? I can’t count the number of meetings I’ve been in where most participants were mentally absent: browsing the intranet or internet, buried in email, or perhaps IM’ing someone across the meeting table or down the hall. Or the number of times a face-to-face conversation was interrupted to take a phone call.
Is that other thing – whatever it happens to be – really so burningly important that it cannot wait? Probably not. So ignore it. You will complete the current task faster and with higher quality by staying focused. Close the laptop, turn off your phone, and give the people around you your full attention.
#7: Match the Medium to the Message
Email, chat, text messages, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, blog posts… which medium to use? Does your communication need to be real-time or is an asynchronous medium more appropriate? Are you trying to deliver a monologue or create a dialogue? In-person or remote? One-to-one or one-to-many? Does the communication even need to happen, or is it more effective to say nothing?
These choices matter because they affect productivity a great deal, both your own and that of people you’re communicating with. My roles at Microsoft were all extremely communication-heavy, so I made these sorts of choices continually throughout the day. I never became a star at it -– I still rely too heavily on email, for instance, as my workmates would testify –- but I did get a lot more adept over time at communicating effectively. This included actively shifting conversations into more appropriate mediums, e.g. identifying the mass email that really ought to be a meeting, or the meeting that really should be resolved with a document. That skill helped me save a lot of time and avoid spamming others.
Choose wisely -– on a per-message basis -– which medium to use, and encourage others to do the same. If you do, you’ll get the message across much more effectively. More signal, less noise.
#8: Take Breaks
Nobody can continually put out top quality work, especially creative work, without taking a break once in a while. So at least once an hour, stop for a few minutes. Get up. Stretch. Go for a walk. Get a drink of water. Do something else and give your brain a chance to recharge.
The same thing holds at the macro scale: take vacations. There is never a good time to take a vacation, so don’t worry about that. Just take it. And make sure the vacation is long enough to (a) fully flush work from your brain, and (b) dissuade your workmates from stockpiling new work for you. I find there is a magic threshold around 10 days after which the rate of incoming mail drops a great deal.
A related technique I used a few times was to post an Out of Office message that read something like this: “Thanks for your mail. I’m on vacation until xx/yy. I’m deleting all email received while I am out of the office. If you need me to act on your email, please resend it to me after I return.” It takes guts to do this, and your workplace might not allow it. But if you can, try it. It makes re-entry a whole lot easier. A close second is to automatically route all mail during that period into an archive folder, which you can reference later if you really need to.
Another tactic in this bucket is to declare an email and/or meeting moratorium one day or half a day a week. (Or a blog holiday, like I’ve been doing the past few weeks.) This works nicely if you can get the whole workgroup to do it at the same time.
#9: Be Draconian With Your Time
You own your time. Be greedy about it. You dig?
Learn to say no to things that are low priority, and to inefficient uses of time, so that you can say yes to the truly important (and usually more fun!) opportunities. When you or your management commits you to something new, explicitly review your project list for something else you can stop doing.
At Microsoft, the true masters at this are Executive Assistants. I will never forget working with Kay Barber-Eck, who handled Paul Maritz’ schedule. On my first day in the team Kay explained to me, with a wicked grin on her face, that the only meetings I could get with Paul would be the 3 minute travel times between one meeting and the next. She meant it, too! Kay would gladly school anyone who violated her time and priority rules, VPs included. She was a blast to work with and worth her weight in gold, because she made everyone else around her far more effective.
#10: It’s the Method, Not the Tools
Don’t confuse productivity methodology with productivity tools. They are entirely different beasts.
A tool used skillfully can help your productivity, and a tool misused can destroy your productivity. This is true of Outlook, Nelson Email Organizer, Gmail, and at least ten other tools that I’ve tried. Good tools are necessary but not sufficient.
Much more important than tools is your methodology -– your mental process -– for managing time and attention. That’s what this essay is about. There are plenty of other productivity methodologies out there, like Getting Things Done, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and related classics like The Mythical Man Month. Find an approach that works for you, and master it. Doing that will trump any tool you can lay hands on. Once you have a methodology under control, you can generally use all sorts of tools to implement it.
Good luck staying afloat!
Email and RSS updates