The information superhighway
has created gridlock for many of us. We are constantly inundated
with unending streams of information. This article reminds us
that progress has its costs. More and better information forces
us to spend more time trying to decide what is important, how
to use that data, and perhaps most dramatically, how to protect
ourselves from being run over by the traffic.
Stanley insists that everyone must develop
a plan to cope with information. Without a plan managers will
become bogged down in minutia, making it difficult to focus on
achieving desirable outcomes. Perhaps it is this focus on minutia
that results in the author's use of the phrase, "analysis
paralysis." In other words, we can spend so much time analyzing
data, we forget that we are most often engaged in a problem solving
process that begs us to use that data to identify barriers to
goal achievement and then choose the best alternatives to reach
those goals.
The single most frequent complaint most
employees - including supervisors and managers - seem to make
these days is the huge flow of e-mail that occurs daily. E-mail
is our most visible manifestation of the information explosion.
Stanley offers several suggestions to control e-mail which is
probably the useful portion of this article. The following list
is reproduced verbatim from the article.
1. Take a speed reading class.
2. Write succinct and well-crafted e-mail.
3. Use e-mail spell check before sending.
4. Ask to have your name removed from cc. mailing lists that
are useless.
5. Remember, IT staff promotes more electronic information. Your
job is to manage it.
6. Don't allow disruptions while checking e-mail once in morning
and once in afternoon.
7. After opening e-mail, delete it, reply to it, print it or
file it away. Never let an e-mail stay.
8. Set up a secret e-mail account. Give to a selected few significant
contacts and superiors.
9. Avoid sending the same information through e-mail and other
mediums. One source only.
10. When on vacation, ask another manager to clear your e-mail.
Remember to return favor.
Clearly not all of these ideas are truly
helpful. For example, most e-mail messages are not so long nor
complicated that a speed reading class would be of great benefit.
Nor would it make sense to ask a colleague to decide which e-mail
messages should be deleted prior to your arrival. (Surely he
or she will be right most of the time, but what about the the
one or two percent of those that you should have kept?)
The author also spends time discussing
the management of paper clutter. His solutions include a more
disciplined approached to deciding which papers to keep, the
use of hanging folders as opposed to manila folders, and color
coding file labels. Again, these are hardly unique ideas, but
in they are ideas we sometimes forget to implement.
But the majority of this article deals
with the cyber elements in our organizational life and suggests
that we all must develop strategies to allow us to navigate the
new highway system with as few fender benders as possible.