browse vs distribution
Careful that what’s intended to be a young and thrusting forum for excitedly pushing back boundaries doesn’t degenerate into a mausoleum for Office documents
Access, Project and Visio for many years now and expect to use them for many more yet. Word, PowerPoint and to a lesser extent Excel, though, I am rapidly going off. I’ve always known that over-prettification of distributed documents is rife in organisations but I’m just beginning to realise how corrosive it is. Increasingly the modern world is more about browse than it is distribution, more about short, negotiated and shared multi-channel communication than it is long and mono- broadcast and more about the quantitative evaluation of what really works than it is bung-it-out-there-and-hope. Yet for a lot of us, despatching highly formatted documents about the place is so much a part of our everyday work lives it’s going to take some serious un-learning. I’m old enough now to remember pre-word processor days when the formatting concept didn’t much exist. Since then I’ve watched users become more and more entranced by the myriad opportunities to titivate raw propositional content. This takes appreciable time and often adds little value. Styles in Word are a particular bugbear and are so overengineered now that few people can use them properly. I’ve noticed that I spend a not inconsiderable amount of time fixing documents and templates sent to me that I’m expected to do something with. And do you remember a few years back the craze for jazzing up your slideshows by adding sound effects and transitions so that the next bullet appeared from nowhere at light speed accompanied by the sound of screeching tyres? Surely that was someone in Seattle having a laugh. Remember that, despite fantastic casting, lighting, cinematography, direction, and so on, the best-loved films are very often the ones with the best scripts. Overformatting is a disease which is spread by email, which many recognise as an outmoded concept that has a lot to answer for. I have a 50+ a day habit and am badly in need of detoxification. But email is so addictive it’s really hard to break free. I fully realize that I will only ever return to a tiny fraction of those emails I religiously file in a complex tree of folders that end up in a groaning .pst file on a server somewhere. I also know that cascading information to the people in my hierarchy is effectiveness-immeasurable, since when it’s gone it’s gone. In many ways a lot of us are imprisoned by our email and it’s going to take some time to fix the culture. Where I work, most of our transactions are no longer carried out using email – and we’re trying to get rid of the ones that still are – but too much of our comms still is. The outlook is not good.
e.learning age february 2014
Live without email It is possible to live without email, or at least to live with significantly less of it. The most celebrated case is that of Luis Suarez of IBM, who almost exactly five years ago decided that enough was enough. Working as part of IBM’s BlueIQ social media team, he walked his own talk and moved the vast majority of his communication out into the open, so instead of sending, cc’ing and bcc’ing emails, he published tasks, FAQs and progress reports online. From being overworked and by his own admission approaching burn out, he now has far greater control over his work life, spends less than five minutes per day doing emails – now limited pretty much to sensitive issues only – and has spread his enthusiasm, skills and experience far more widely, and crucially has encouraged others to do the same. Famously, he even bet people dinner out that they could achieve the same thing. I’m preparing to take that bet (metaphorically) because that’s where I’d like
to get to. An often cited study by Atos Origin discovered that the average worker spends 40% of their time “doing email” which adds no value to the business. We do email when we’re doing nothing else and this is part of the problem. If that 40% were shunted to the beginning of the week, it would be Wednesday before many of us did anything really worthwhile. Even if we notice this drain on our productive time, many of us grin and bear it. Actually, it’s often worse than that. Ask yourself what proportion of the remaining 60% you spend working on Office documents for syndication by email. I call this the “fatal attachment” problem. We are overly attached to our attachments, creating, editing, re-editing, version controlling, re- distributing – it quickly becomes a full time job. Fatal attachments are a major downside of working in a bureaucracy. Lest you think I’m being disloyal to my employer I’ve seen parts of government which are amazingly fleet of foot; likewise I’ve seen young thrusting new age companies that have mired themselves in offline documentation that adds little value probably because they feel it’s expected of them. I’ve found that people’s attachment to attachments can really get in the way of social learning sites: attachments are often quite a hassle to upload, tag, search, comment upon, consume (depending on your viewer) and prioritise. Careful that what’s intended to be a young and thrusting forum for excitedly pushing back boundaries doesn’t degenerate into a mausoleum for Office documents. In an ideal world all information would be 1) co-designed and constructed with representative end-users, 2) browsed, media-proportionate, and 3) (please!) no frills. Is that really so much to ask? Drop me an email to tell me what you think. Or, on second thoughts...
Dr Tim Gibson heads management consultancy Makem Scrivener
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