Dyepot, Teapot

A couple of jobs back (actual time: about a year ago) I worked in the data services department at a medical billing company. My coworkers and I were in charge of making sure that data was transmitted to and from the customers on schedule. Most of this was automated, so we had a lot of downtime for reading celebrity gossip magazines, but when something broke down, it was a different story. Sooner or later you’d have a day where the programmers pushed out an update with unexpected side effects, your data files were corrupt, the file transfer script failed to run on time, and every customer was calling to ask “where’s my file and what’s this trash I received instead?”.

While I was there I learned a fair bit about what to do when your brain is screaming ‘I can’t do all of this at once where do I start how do I make these people shut up and go away aaaaah!’. And I’ve been interested to see that a number of busy tech types are experiencing this feeling with respect to their own business communications. Many of them are concluding that the way out is to to cut back on the things calling for their attention. If that works, great, but I don’t think it’s the only option. At the operations job I handled the overload through aggressive triage. Anything that can be done later, should. I also put things that had specific deadlines on my schedule, and those were completely non-negotiable, no scheduling meetings at the same time. My apology-writing skills also got a fair workout some weeks.

I’ve been following the way Stowe Boyd pushes back against the ‘information overload’ panic, and I think he has some very useful tips: You don’t have to reply to everything. You don’t have to read everything. If it’s important, it’ll come up again. I would add: learn to assess what’s important in this moment. Whatever just appeared in your inbox probably isn’t it. Triage, and put anything you can’t work on right now out of your mind.

The biggest disagreement between Stowe and his critics is that they see the state of having more email etc. than they can respond to as a sort of crisis mode, while he believes it to be business as usual. If it’s a crisis, then you want to figure out how to get out of that state as fast as possible (which would be appropriate when the thing filling your inbox and voice mail is ‘the server’s down again and all of our customers are threatening to leave’). But when it’s just your regular work, people you’re talking to about future projects, and other assorted communication (emails from mom, Facebook friend requests, …), a different strategy is required. Unless you want fewer friends, want fewer business contacts, fewer interesting and exciting projects. You could do that. But I’m pretty sure that anyone who winds up in this situation likes the busy busy life. They just feel bad about the unanswered email, and worry that they’re ignoring something important. It’s an unpleasant panicky feeling, but it’s not rational or useful, and if you know that, you’ll be able to work with it.

This is what my triage process looks like right now. Lower priority: Messages from people I don’t know. Questions sent to a group, especially if someone else will probably be able to answer. Links to fun videos, websites, and other distractions. Anything I can resolve the next time I see them in person. Higher priority: Messages from people I know and like talking to. Questions that can’t be answered by other people, especially if they involve potential work. Anything that involves my calendar, like planning future events or meetings.

That’s usually enough to get my inbox and other pieces of incoming information in order. It requires a bit of faith that anything I forget that involves people I know, I can sort out later without too much trouble. I think the best criteria for figuring out whether what you’re doing is working is this: Can people get in touch with you when they need to? Are your business and personal relationships suffering? Those are affected by a lot more than just how many emails you answer in a day, or how fast you return a phone call.

Updated to add: Kaitlin Sherwood has a great post on why email isn’t the problem (”People have been overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that other people give them to do since long before email.”, she writes).

Morning Edition had an interesting segment in their business news this morning: a woman wrote in to say that she felt her boss was too interested in her personal life, and wanted advice on how to respond. The part that caught my attention is barely summarized in the story’s page on the NPR website, though. At the end of the conversation with Kathy (the employee) and Ben Dattner (a workplace consultant and psychologist), Ben asks, “Have you thought about why her interest in what you do outside of work feels like prying?” And they talk for a minute about how our past experiences, and family experiences in particular, affect how we interpret people’s actions when we interact with them at work.

It’s a short piece, and you can hear the whole thing on the website (linked above), so I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in this topic to go listen.

To follow up on item 6 from my post earlier today, how can you tell if you have good communication within a group? This is really essential within any kind of structure, hierarchical or not. I asked Lucas for input and added a few items from conversations I’ve had recently.

Things that indicate good communication:

People bring up questions and problems before they become crises.

Everyone involved is in agreement about each others’ roles and responsibilities.

People readily admit fault and take responsibility for their actions and decisions.

If a person doesn’t immediately have the answer to something, they state this and offer assistance finding the information (as appropriate to their role within the group).

When a person does have answers or information, they share it readily, and don’t use that knowledge to gain more power or control.

Signs of bad communication:

People seem to be withholding concerns or questions, and others who observe this don’t attempt to engage them in the discussion.

Discussions quickly turn into arguments, which may or may not seem relevant to the original topic. (Think of a married couple’s fight on a sitcom.)

Group members often avoid talking to particular people when gathering information or making decisions (going around them).

Outsiders get the sense that there’s an elephant in the room (something on everyone’s minds that no one wants to talk about).

One of my colleagues often talks about how people’s personal and professional lives are linked, particularly when it comes to communication. Most of us enter the adult world with only the (sometimes dysfunctional) patterns we learned at home. It can really kill all of your interactions with other people to not pay attention to the quality of communication you have in each of the parts of your life.

Does anyone have suggestions for other signs of good and bad communication patterns?

A few thoughts on picking the right structure for the activity:

I’m not pro- or anti-hierarchy. I think there are times when hierarchical group structures make sense, and times when collaborative/flattened structures are better. I’ve been noticing that groups struggle a lot with this issue (particularly groups that want to keep an open structure, like RCC or BarCamp). So here are some things to consider:

1. Smaller groups are more agile. Dilbert has covered that in detail (it’s funny because it’s true). The more people in on a decision, the longer it will take. Including more people does not guarantee that everyone’s views are considered appropriately, either, because not all people are assertive in large conversations.
2. If something has to get done, then one or two people need to be responsible for monitoring it. I’ve been in too many situations where people assume that “the group” will be able to make sure that all the important details are covered. Sorry, but this doesn’t actually work. It’s like organizing a potluck: you’ll end up with three kinds of jello salad, brownies, and five bottles of cheap wine. This may or may not be the dinner anyone wanted to eat.
3. Planning committees and other active sub-groups do not have to be permanent, unchanging structures. Maybe right now you need a couple of people to scout out locations or call sponsors and report back. Later you’ll need people to clean up, but it might be enough to announce that at the start of the event and post a sign-up sheet. Be flexible. Don’t turn it into some kind of clique or cabal.
4. Also related: not everyone has to participate at the same level. Some people will want to be involved in every aspect of planning. Some people just want to show up. There are many levels in between. Keep this in mind as you sort out what work needs to be done.
5. If the larger group involved can come to a consensus on the goals of the activity, you’ll be able to act in a much more focused way. Use the goals as a boundary line to ask “Is this inside or outside of the thing we want to do?”
6. The more hierarchical and specialized the group structure, the clearer your guidelines for communication need to be. This is also true of urgent issues or those that have a strong impact on people’s lives. Maybe you have three people researching code management and bug tracking systems, and they can give a summary at the big group meeting next month. Maybe you’re involved in disaster planning, which has very strict guidelines for organization and communication. Ask: “Who needs this information? How frequently do they need updates in order to do their job (and to feel in the loop)? Who should be giving feedback?”
7. Give people just walking in a handle on the activity. It needs to be easy to figure out what things can be done next, or who has the first aid kit, or who will be planning the marketing effort. If the newcomer can’t walk in, find something to do, and figure out who to ask more specific questions, they won’t stick around.

This is phrased in terms of a group planning a single event, but I think the same considerations are important to a lot of different activities. Think about how this affects your company or department at work. Or your user group. Or your parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party. The basic principles are the same any time you have a group of people and something you want to do.

Somehow I managed to sign up for Twitter the same week it started to get attention everywhere online. I don’t think me signing up and all the other attention is related. I decided to try it because Tara Hunt mentioned that her office now had a Nabaztag, and that they’d set it up with an account on Twitter, which reminded me that I was kinda curious about the service and might as well sign up and see what it was about (I want one of those rabbits too, but they cost money and all this travel has killed my toy budget). And then the next day everyone seemed to be talking about it, which is one of those things that happens to me a lot, and always makes me feel like I’m about 12 hours ahead of the zeitgeist, which is not really far enough to be useful. Instead I get the annoyance of discovering something only to immediately find it on a dozen blogs and sometimes even the NYT or NPR.

Anyhow.

I think it’s a fun little toy, but I’m not entirely sure why it’s getting so much attention except that people like to discover something and then hype it up (er, am I guilty of that too, by posting this?). The idea is that you send short messages, either by SMS or IM or a web interface, that are then rebroadcast to whoever signs up to receive them. There’s also a public timeline of all messages, which is interesting if you ever wonder what random other people are up to at this moment. The entertainment value of that particular feature is probably limited, though.

Services like this have a lot of potential beyond the goofy “huh, my friend Kari is flossing her teeth right now” voyeurism that’s going on right now. If you have a dozen people on vacation or at a conference who want to spend the day wandering around semi-independently, this lets you keep in touch and plan lunch together without having to schedule everything in advance. I could also see it working for a group coordinating an event, where people are off getting things done but need to stay connected without being interrupted by a radio message or phone call. Not all communication requires an immediate reply, sometimes you just need to have a log of what’s going on in your pocket.

Anyhow, there’s a little Twitter display widget on my blog for now, and you can go to http://twitter.com/spinnerin if you want the web page version, or have an account and want to add me. I can’t promise it will be interesting, or that in a week I’ll still be sending updates, but I’ll keep playing with it for at least a bit longer. Maybe until the public timeline gets flooded with new people posting “testing… does this thing work?”.

If I can make time, I want to follow up on this with a post about handling all of the streams of information available to us these days. I’ve been using the internet for about 12 years, and in that time to amount of content we interact with online has increased immensely, as have the variety of ways we can receive that content. I think I might have something useful to say about managing information overload.