The next Holy Grail of collaboration is to kill the 28% of our day spent on distractions
October 2 2008, 12:10pm
In June the NY Times reported that the average information worker is distracted for 28% of their day. Unstructured email communication makes it difficult to stay focused. I know I loose focus daily from some of these email offenses:
Rambling thought dumps The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you Noisy DLs
So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution? Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive. But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver communication bullet. Sometimes you need to IM someone. Sometimes you want to share something, but not with a particular person. Sometimes you want to have a group discussion that is easier to follow than a chain of “reply all” emails. Consumer social media burst into businesses to fill these other communication needs. To those of us used to consumer social media, we saw a ton of potential applications and value in bringing these tools to work. But, wise naysayers kept pressing for a better explanation. They wanted to know how these communication tools were going to serve a purpose. They didn’t want to invite another distraction inside the firewall. What’s the fear of microblogging in the enterprise? That it will be a distraction. What’s the fear of social networking within the enterprise? That people will be goofing off instead of working, ergo distracted. Slowly, the reality has set it for me. They are right to be concerned! If Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t help a business structure their communication, they can’t help workers be less distracted. If we introduce a bevy of content management tools (social or not) without some context and attention management, we’re just trading seats on the Titanic. What can we do about our distractedness? There are some tools available today that can help a person reduce their distraction. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that today, it requires a ton of elbow grease to manage your attention and to stay on top of your communication. The current wave of communication innovation started in the consumer sector, and has only recently spread to businesses. Unfortunately, the communication needs for a business are different than that of a social scene. Vendors have popped up to meet the unique needs of a business, but it’s taking a few years because their needs are different than consumers—both drastically (needs lots of development time) and subtly (hard to recognize). Individuals need an unstructured, flat playground in order to pursue life, liberty, and property, which seems to make people happy. Businesses, on the other hand, have a mission that requires some structure in order be a productive, which seems to make them money and that makes them happy. So, when flat, unstructured tools emerged unplanned within businesses, it caused some commotion from the needs disconnect. Collaboration vendors have been busy focusing on interoperability and integration for the past couple of years, which is necessary because the innovation we really need requires this foundation to be in place. At the moment, we can buy many tools to create and receive content, but little to nothing to help make sense of it, much less automation assistance. However, that is changing. 2009 is going to be an interesting year for attention management tools in the enterprise. Socialtext is working on some innovative stuff with Signals, which provides automated context updates. Several vendors offer dashboards now, which allows workers to focus on the info that helps them do their jobs. Platform players are separating from the crowded pack of point solutions, and it will be interesting to see how the market shapes up by the end of ‘09. There’s also a divergence starting between vendors focusing on internal communication and the ones focusing on external communication needs. I think we’ll see the ones working on the consumer social media loose ground to the ones working on meeting the unique needs of a business. Copying and pasting consumer social media inside the firewall won’t a market leader create in the coming year. So what? What if we weren’t so distracted? What if our we had more time to be productive? What if we had that 28% of our day back? Imagine what we could do with that time! Can you think of something else that we could solve that would give nearly everyone a quarter to a third more time everyday?
