Note: I originally posted this to our internal discussion board at work looking for feedback. I wanted to share and archive it here as I think it’s a common problem for a lot of people and organizations.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about how we communicate as an organization and would like to publicly decree that I’m out to kill how we use email. No, I’m not going to go dismantle the Exchange server or anything like that, but rather I’d like to help figure out what went wrong when email was unleashed upon the world and take back control of our time and attention.
Like some villainous fungus sprung up in a night we have no natural defenses against it. We check it so frequently that it’s become an almost Pavlovian response to look at a screen when you hear a small chime. We use it to send out time sensitive and critical information, yet it was designed to be a passive asynchronous medium. We check it at work and at play – a times of the day where you can’t do anything about it other than fret. I’ve even been in meetings where people are checking email for other work and not paying attention to the work at hand!
What can we do to establish a more productive and sane email culture? I realize it’s not solely email’s fault for our difficulty in focusing on one thing at a time (and don’t get me started on the myth of multitasking), but we have to start somewhere.
So let’s start. Please join me and share you best advice for handling email. What tips and tricks do you use to help keep your head above the water and remain a well-functioning and communicative co-worker?
I’ll kick off with a few ideas of my own.
How do you create intelligent subject lines?
Are you asking a question? Start the subject with “Question – blah blah blah”. Meeting invite? “Meeting Invite – blah blah blah”
Best practices for managing inbox cruft?
You’ll never read those 113 newsletters you subscribed to about. Unsubscribe now, it’s ok. Use filters to automatically prioritize work. Email from a person or thing (like MTS Alerts) that are often high priority – filter them to an “Important” sub-folder. Med or low priority to a “Not So Important” sub-folder.
What’s the socially acceptable way to reply to a confirmation of something?
Answer: single sentence email replies – bad. Elaborate or don’t bother to reply.
Did anyone ever attend “How to use Email and not go Totally Insane 101” when they first got email?
No!? Why not? Should we host a Communities of Knowledge or workshop around email best practices?
Here’s some recent and related articles I’ve been reading that has me all riled up. I don’t have all the answers on how we can better leverage our time – and more importantly our attention, but here’s to a start.
I discovered a little trick when pairing an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and I thought I’d share my notes in hopes that I could help someone in a similar situation. Let me know in the comments if this helped you!
I borrowed a cubemate’s Bluetooth Apple Keyboard to use with my Mac while I’m at my work desk. He had previously paired the keyboard to one of his iPads1 and did not un-pair it before giving it to me.
I was able to set up the keyboard just fine, but every once in a while it refuses to pair to my Mac. I power the keyboard on, the green light appears for a moment and then goes dark. While I have yet to confirm my suspicions, I believe that it’s trying to pair with the previous iPad and in certain cases succeeding.
I discovered that if you hold the power button down while trying to pair the keyboard to a new device it will force the keyboard into “discovery” mode.
With the keyboard off2 press and hold the power button. Don’t let go. Now open the “Bluetooth Setup Assistant” under “Set up Bluetooth Device” via the Bluetooth menu item.3
Select your keyboard from the list of discovered devices and select Continue. If all goes well you should be prompted to enter the randomly generated 8 digit pass code to pair the keyboard. Once you see this screen you can stop holding down the Power button and continue the pairing process.
I throughly enjoyed this video from Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, (via RSA) on how a networked view of the world is better suited to explain the complex relationships between things than the past “tree” view.
I feel a little vindicated as a person who is not very “T” shaped in the sense of skills or specialty. I’m much more of a polymath – knowing a little bit about many areas of knowledge – and perhaps that’s an asset, not what I’ve worried about being a negative thing.
Recently I’ve started a new job where my work is focused around the internal social collaboration5 of work, enterprise search and how to identify strong influencers within the organization. This has led me to viewing and examining many personal profiles in our growing intranet.
I noticed that my profile on our internal workspace, written 6 months ago now, sounded a little naive and was not consistent with what I had actually been working on, nor was it in sync with my personal site, Quora, Facebook, etc.
Writing ‘About’ sections of profiles is hard for me. I’m not a man of much hubris and always feel a little silly writing about myself. Not to mention I often try out various new applications and re-create my profile in new ways each time, leading to hundreds of permutations.
That’s when I thought, “What if I were to ask someone else to write a brief description of me?” Then I realized that sounded far too narcissistic. But it did bring up the question, “What could someone find out about me, given only my name, location and access to the Internet?”
Using Mechanical Turk, I created a job (called a Human Intelligence Tasks or HiT) and asked the following:
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I hate filling out the “About Me” sections of social sites (including my own site). I always feel like I sound corny, I’m a terrible writer and I can never remember to keep it consistent across the various places where I’m asked to ‘describe yourself’. So I thought I would mix things up a bit.
How would you describe a person you’ve never met, given only the information publicly accessible on the Internet?
Using Google (or a search engine of your choice) find out about me and write a brief bio.
My name is Chris Koerner – As far as I know, the only one that lives in St. Louis, MO, USA.
That’s it, all the information I’m giving you.
Please use clean language and be polite in what you write.
Feel free to be funny and creative. The more unique your submission, the more likely I’ll accept it!
Length isn’t super important, but to keep things fair I’d like a minimum of 300 words or 8-10 sentences.
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I then provided two open text boxes for Turks to submit their description and any feedback they have.
What the Hit looked like.
The results are quite surprising. The range in voice between each description, the information one person found and others did not and even the particular facts of my life that, through this unique lens, somehow come out a little off.
“… A great turn around happened in my life when I blessed with a baby child and the same year I graduated. I learned a lot about computers related to programing, server architecture and web designing in different working places or seminars. I see the new technology development in different perspective by empowering people in digital media with very user friendly tools…”
Well, that’s close.
“… I am 28 years old and have a wife named Clara and a 3 year old son named Spencer…”
That’s all inaccurate. Perhaps there’s some not-so-evil doppelgänger Chris out there?
“… He is a photographer, a movie buff (and reviewer), and a music lover. Most notably, he is an advisor to the world…”
A totally different voice in this one. I like that I’m “an advisor to the world”. I’m putting that on my resume.
“… I am lucky to be in the place I want to be: St. Louis, where I have lived all of my life and am lucky to have a wonderful wife and adorable daughter to keep me healthy and focused on all of the right things in the right time – the moment…”
That’s deep.
“… Did I ever excel on my newspaper route while in high school; having the opportunity to read the newspaper everyday, and converse with some of the regulars on my newspaper route, lead me on my path to journalism law and the legalities. Now I am on the other side. At age 34; even though I still have many questions to ask, I am ready to also answer them…”
What is this I don’t even.
“… If you are looking for Chris and you cannot find him, you can try looking at Vallarta Mexican restaurant in Wildwood or at the zoo with his family…”
I’ve been to that Mexican restaurant once. Out of all the information they could find they picked that?
Once again, you can read the rest, including the full versions I quoted above in this Google Doc.
The Stats – or how I would end up paying lower than minimum wage and feel bad about it.
I set the variables for accepting HiTs using Andy’s project as a template. I didn’t want to spend too much money on something that I wasn’t sure would work, so I limited myself to 10 accepted HiTs at $2.50 apiece. Adding in Amazon’s fee, this came out to a total of $27.50.
I was expecting about 30 minutes of work to pull together enough information for a few sentences. Using Andy’s advice I gave each Turk one hour to complete the task.
I received 13 submissions7 through Mechanical Turk, three of which I declined only because the submissions were either a direct copy and paste from my own About page, or gibberish.
In the end it took 4 days to gather submissions. The average time of completion was 24 minutes and 43 seconds with an effective hourly rate of $6.07.
Which, may I remind you, is far below the United States federal minimum wage of $7.258. This was not intentional, nor is it entirely accurate. Turks can be working on multiple HiTs in parallel, thereby raising their individual hourly rate. I think $2.50 was rather high for a HiT, but given my lack of experience in this area I could be mistaken.
Tips for Turk Requesters
Be clear in what you’re asking. In my case I was asking for submissions, but wasn’t clear if I was paying for all legit attempts, or just those that I preferred. I was contacted by a few turks who were polite in asking questions about my acceptance policy. All made a valid point – that rejections, even if it fit the instructions, still negatively impact Turks ratings.
I accepted 10 out of the 13 submissions. Those that didn’t meet the above description were asked to resubmit if they so chose.9
Turk Feedback
I allowed the Turks to provide feedback to me via the submission form. A few chose to do so. Here’s their responses.
“I hope you like my work. You are an interesting person and it was fun to put pieces of someones life together from snippets to form a web bio. Is this a secret web project, Chris? :-)”
This Turk was on to me! I wonder if they read my Tweet.
“This was an interesting assignment. Its positively disturbing how much info I was able to find.”
Disturbing indeed.
How are you perceived online?
At the university where I previously worked, part of the new student orientation was a brief message about how to handle yourself online. After that, the awareness on how to present yourself online was left up to the individual student.
Working in higher education it was frequently a point of discussion of how young people present themselves online. On occasion you’d hear about students (and often directly from students if you were friendly with them.) not getting a job or loosing face when potential employers or graduate schools would find information that didn’t reflect well on their character with a few simple Google searches.
I’ve always been intentional in what I put online. I put a lot of information out in the public space, but stay out of many topics and discussions that may be sensitive. I keep those for polite offline conversation.
This has been an interesting experiment in seeing how intentional or unintentional public information about one’s self could be used to provide a unique, and in this case slightly erratic, portrait of a person.
Narcissism & Laziness
My goal was not to cheaply create a well-written, accurate and descriptive bio of myself, but rather to better understand the public nature of the information we put out in the Internet. As the results show, even a serious attempt to have someone write about you would cover a large gamut in voice and quality. It should be noted that the Turks fulfilling this HiT were most likely attempting to spend just the right amount of time on a submission to get accepted. More time spent could create a deeper and more accurate profile of an individual.
Conclusion
I doubted this would actually work. It’s not the normal kind of thing you’d see Mechanical Turk being used for and I wasn’t sure that anyone would attempt to fulfill the request. Additionally, while I was certain I hadn’t put anything dangerous or harmful to myself online, I was a little hesitant to see what people would find. My wife thought that I was crazy. While that may be the case, the Turks didn’t say anything!
Photography has struggled to be considered a form of art since its inception. Technological advances have led to more accessible tools with enhanced capabilities for the everyman. It has evolved from being complicated and time-consuming to becoming an easy and popular medium consumed and, more importantly, created by many, many people. This existential argument of the validity of photography as an art form persists to this day and is most recently manifested in the numerous rantings of individuals over the validity and usefulness of the mobile app Instagram.
Instagram, for the uninitiated, is an application for your smart phone that allows you to take pictures, apply an optional filter to stylized the photo, and then share said photo with other people via Instagram’s own social network or sharing to Facebook, Twitter, etc.
There are a few curmudgeon who think that Instagram is useless or in some extreme cases ruining the art and profession of photography.
Anyone who’s ever tried to take a photograph with even a minuscule hint of creativity are artists. Framing a shot, choosing certain lenses, lens filters and post production all modify the reality of the thing being photographed.
Another thing about this progression of art (and by association, photography) is how prior works influence new works. I can take a picture of Yosemite just like Ansel Adams, but that’s only because his work came before mine. I could even use my much more technically sophisticated tools to duplicate the style of Adams – to evoke the same feelings. Does it make my photo art?
All art builds on prior art. Even if your purposefully attempting to be contrary to existing art or a particular style. Opposing that which came before it means you’re cognitively aware of its influence and history! No art exists in a vacuum and therefore the work of people using Instagram is just as valid as someone earning income, a professional, using his high-end Nikon D800 to capture a certain look or emotion with lens, lighting and Photoshop.
Instagram is art and the people using it are artists – with, or without, the filters.
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So what if I’m wrong? What if this entire essay is inaccurate in claiming that users of Instagram are artists and the resulting images, modified or not, are art?
If Instagram isnt art, then it’s just silly fun – a game. Relax. If you’re going to get upset over fun, then I’d love to hear you talk about how Scrabble is not writing, and is deserving of equal flack.
