The Unconventional Guide to Tackling Information Overload
In this digital era, making information inbound and intelligent may be the best way to make sure only the right content reaches you.
In a dynamic work environment, there are several interaction and communication channels that run in parallel. Since communication is a vital piece in every team’s success, it becomes extremely key for both individuals, as well as teams to keep these channels under control so that one has to do the least amount of work to access the most important piece of information.
Here are a few examples of information channels…
- Announcements on dashboards / notice boards
- Chat
- Phone calls
- 1:1 discussions
- Group discussions
Some of these are more active in nature, which have an implicit sense of urgency, while some others are a lot more passive. Shown below is a simple model to represent this.
The position of each of these tools in the graph is debatable, actually. Let’s take an example. While some people might use email mostly for group communication, some others may use it for both 1:1 conversations too. So, in one way it becomes an active resolution tool, but it remains passive otherwise. The attempt to position a tool is by considering an average of all the information that comes via that channel. So, the point really isn’t about the exact position about every tool, but about what we can interpret from it about active resolution.
To help an incoming piece of information orient itself towards active resolution, it is important to have the right sense of urgency and the right number of people (owners) paying attention to it.
The best way to achieving this sort of a result is to ensure that the incoming information is intelligent enough to understand its appropriate medium for delivery. Usually, I find it effective to classify information under one of the following categories.
Stuff that requires active resolution…
Which requires immediate action and everything possible to close out quickly. Make sure such information come in search of you, as opposed to having to check on it once in a while.
Stuff that requires passive resolution…
Which means you should be able to check on it once or twice a day, at your disposal.
Junk
Which you shouldn’t even know that it exists. Forget discarding it. Even coming to know of it is a waste of time, which cumulatively will be a significant portion of your life.
When information meant for passive resolution disguises itself as information for active resolution, or vice versa, it ends up in tremendous amount of wasted time. The more we can stay away from these patterns, the longer focus windows we will be able to create to do other things.
Depending on the medium of communication, information gets classified into one of the categories automatically. In some cases, additional setup may be required.
Let me use email as an example again, preferably GMail. The plain vanilla GMail (when it began) had one big bulky inbox that fought spam well. But it still never could differentiate between items for active versus passive resolution. Over time, Google has been trying different techniques, such as Priority Inbox, categorization into Forums, Promotions, etc. and the implementation of the new Inbox. Even with all that, most people still prefer their loyal set of rules to classify information into active and passive resolution categories.
The most recent tools like Slack have very good potential to tackle both these categories, but with its current design, it does have a slight bias towards pushing everything to demand a bit of active resolution, which sometimes becomes unnecessary. But hey, its quite impressive for what it offers out of the box.
Shortly, I’ll write about a few examples to demonstrate how we solved some of these information overload problems in our startup and helped everyone towards active resolution.
