In the early 1980s, when I was running while attending Stanford as a student, a small software company, my business activities were restricted to the number of calls that I could receive in a day. I would at the most 5-10 phone teleconferencing.
In 2010, with email and social networking all the limits in synchronous group interaction are gone and I now unlimited sessions per day. At the I count on the emails I send the blog comments to respond and I can have the Twitter/forums/text/linked in/Plaxo/Facebook interactions 500 sessions per day.
What does that really mean?
One of my coworkers it combined perfectly when I asked him what keeps him up at night, to
"The flow of e-Mail and expectation to all of us to react quickly has become more challenging for me as probably the most because of the great diversity of the areas I cover." "I have changes and remove unnecessary support queues (daily to the monitor), delegate as much as possible, and the necessary changes."
The demands of 500 virtual meetings per day up to the person in meetings results in what I call "Continuous partial attention." An hour in who are implying that you force 50 virtual meetings behind end time face to face, attention span to fade, take about 10 minutes in each personally. The modern electronic world has removed all obstacles to escalation and makes it easy to plan. Everyone can break some 24 x 7 x 365. Immediate frictionless communication is analogous to the revolution in the publishing industry, where everyone can be an author/publisher/editor without any triage.
What is the best strategy for dealing with this communication overload? Here are a few, I have seen:
1. Declare an end to the madness and listen to mobile e-Mail and SMS. Some executives have taken inspiration from Corona beer advertising and cast your BlackBerry into the ether.
2. In urged one firewall around your schedule on. One of my coworkers published this week out of Office message. When I, asked him about it, he said
"I am just trying to take some time to complete and my outgoing message helps filter the emergencies last minute stragglers who want something, that really don't need as I'm trying to stop elements above required year-end attention until after the break."
3. Accept the chaos and schedule around it, create an open access scheme, half reserves, the working day for asynchronous, unplanned work every day.
4. Ignore your emails. Some officers simply never respond and have inboxes with thousands of unanswered e-Mails.
5. Delegate e-Mail management. Some managers delegate e-Mail to trusted Assistant to disconnect that the wheat from the chaff escalation support a few emails per day, to the Executive Branch, you.
Click at the moment I always still # 3, but I must admit it is increasingly difficult. I get over 1000 emails per day and try to respond each, one, but for the last 6 months I have been unread delete any e-Mail that starts
"Hi, I'm Bob at the xyz.com and our products..."
or
"Hi, I'm a venture capitalist and I would like an hour of your time..."
I hope I am answering my critical asynchronous communication in a timely manner and only ignore these communications that are lower priority. 500 E-Mail and social networking answers per day I am my bandwidth limits, approaches that I never thought would happen.
I will do my best, and clear my queue every night before sleep. If I somehow you missed my 500 sessions per day, please let me know!
John Halamka, MD, is the CIO at Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center and author of the popular life as a healthcare CIO blog, where technology and business of health care issues writing is as leader of the IT Department of a large hospital systems. He is a frequent contributor to the THCB.
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