To understand how and why we experience information overload we need to recognize that the main reason we collect information is to influence ourselves and others. Not entirely unrelated is the fact that one of the most important factors in attaining happiness is having influence over others. Without it we lose our raison d’être. This is also essentially…
It all started with a client. To begin with, his IT manager had told him that 92% of his incoming email was spam and was filtered out before it ever reached his inbox. So my client never saw more than ninety percent of his incoming volume. What my client found even more astonishing was that…
I have this weird habit, one might think. Before I click send on a mail that contains a document that I have attached, I open the document and check it one last time. Even if I have already gone through the document, or have just created it, I open it once it is attached to…
With 300+ likes and 1K shares, the strategy article 8 things every leader should know about strategy somehow struck a nerve. But as many readers pointed out correctly, it’s one thing to know what strategy is all about, but it’s another to get out there and come up with one. As you will probably agree, there is…
Training successfully educates only those who are predisposed to the new material. Others may endeavor to learn during class but may not permanently adopt it. The problem isn’t the value of information or the eagerness of the learner: It’s a problem with both the training model itself and the way learners learn. It’s a systems/change…
OK, I have a small company of only 200 employees, so $3.2 million is nothing. But imagine a company of 2,000 employees that spend 2 hrs. per day on email with an average annual salary of $70,000. That would mean that they spend OVER HALF A MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY managing email. Since we…
Change = changing habits If you want to change anything about yourself, it will require changing one or more habits, and since developing or stopping or changing a habit is so darn difficult, it’s best to focus on one particular habit at a time. Since it is so hard to do this, you will need…
There’s a horde of startups trying to replace email. Some of these apps, like Slack (which we use at Business Insider), take a chat-room approach. There are enterprise messaging apps that work like Snapchat, like Cotap and TigerText. Some mobile-first productivity apps like Quip imagine that we’ll communicate directly in the documents we’re working on….