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Handling Information Overload

Posted on April 15, 2010 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments

I’ve been thinking about information overload for the past month or so.

It started with Jeff De Cagna’s breakfast session on Solving 21st Century Problems back in early March.

Then the #assnchat for March 16 focused on this topic.

Then I read this fun piece by Garrison Keillor in Salon.

And, in thinking about it, I realized that I actually do a pretty good job of this. I’m not always totally on top of every latest rumor about every bleeding edge technology or device. But I’m reasonably well-informed about most things related to social media and association management, while still being productive and successful in my job, spending a fair amount of time volunteering for ASAE and other groups in the DC community, writing this blog, writing an active and well-syndicated NFL blog, preserving time to read non-work-related stuff, having a life outside of all that and unplugging on a regular basis – all WITHOUT a smart phone.

In short, I have some tips to share for managing information overload.

My number 1 tip may be the hardest to replicate: be a fast reader who has good recall. I was already pretty good at this, but I got REALLY good in grad school. I do NOT recommend starting grad school just to acquire this skill. That’s like cutting off your arm to cure a paper cut. But anything you can do to speed up your pace and increase your retention will help. Yes, that means practice, and it also means focusing on one thing at a time.

That brings me to tip 2: multitasking is a myth. Music (preferably without lyrics) in the background while you’re writing? Sure. Skimming the headlines on the elliptical machine? You bet. Repeated cycling back and forth from working on next fiscal year’s budget to answering your email? Not so much. Every time you force your brain between disparate tasks, you lose momentum. That’s disastrous, particularly for tasks that require “flow.”

Tip 3: know and use the difference between “reading” and “skimming.” That rapid pace deep retention reading I do? I don’t use it for everything. I don’t need to devote that level of energy to my morning WaPo, or most magazine articles, or some emails, or most tweets, or some blog posts. The trick is to be able to QUICKLY identify which level of attention/retention is required and choose appropriately. But be a voracious reader and skimmer – you never know where your next great idea will be coming from.

Tip 4: choose what you pay attention to carefully. Social Media Today just wrote about this under the guise of trimming your lists. But the point is: only pay attention to what you’re really paying attention to. No matter how “famous” the person is, if you’re not getting anything out of following them or reading their blog, cut ’em. Be ruthless. You’ll never get to the meat if you’re inundated with fluff.

Tip 5: have a solid information organization system. Mine’s basically 3 pronged: my totally old skool, no-wifi, no email Palm Pilot (feel free to mock me, but I think, used properly, it’s the greatest productivity tool ever invented), my Del.icio.us bookmarks, and my relentlessly pruned and managed RSS feed. It’s not fancy, it’s not necessarily the latest technology or gizmo, but it enables me to keep basically everything I need to hand. It’s supplemented by a carefully chosen group of Google docs (not everything, just the really important stuff), and, again, carefully chosen tweeps to follow. I don’t need to be in touch with everyone, and I prune for value all the time.

A few more:

Only touch things once to the greatest degree possible. Your Outlook inbox is not a filing system. Neither is a giant pile o’ papers on your desk. Neither is an about-to-topple-over-and-crush-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night stack of books and magazines next to your bed. If it’s quick, deal with it now. If it’s not quick but important, put it on a relentlessly pruned, SMALL pile to deal with as soon as you get a block of time (and keep a list of your priority items and make sure you know when your next block of time is coming – and the one after that). If it’s FYI or for future reference, file it IMMEDIATELY. And when you *have* a block of time, don’t futz around on Twitter. Twitter’s for “I have 5 minutes between finishing this task and my next meeting.” Likewise, when all you have is 5 minutes between finishing this task and your next meeting, that is NOT the time to start writing the organization-wide marketing plan for next year. Fit the tasks to the time you have.

Set boundaries. Does technology really “set us free”? I’m not sure that it’s progress that Dad can email from the Blackberry while on a conference call while pushing Junior on the swings, particularly given what we know about our lack of ability to truly multitask. With very few exceptions (you’re a doctor or Barack Obama – and if so, thanks for reading, Mr. President!), no one’s life is dependent on your being accessible 24/7. Trust me – you’re not that indispensable. None of us are. And constantly checking up on your staff (which is what refusing to be offline EVER is all about) tells them that you don’t have confidence in them. Is that really the message you want to send?

Does that message (that it’s OK to set boundaries) have to come from the top of your organization? It certainly helps, but in my experience, no. You *can* set your own boundaries, particularly if, when you’re on the job, you’re 100% on, and you’re clear about when you are and aren’t available – and if you really feel that you can’t set boundaries in your current organization, you might want to look for another job.

Related to that, beware false urgency. Just because Twitter and FB and email and smart phones make it possible for me to answer you in 30 seconds at any time of the day or night doesn’t mean that you actually need that. Have you ever noticed that if, say, you’re somewhere without Internet access for a few days, when you return to your email, there are THOUSANDS of messages? And if you start at the end of the various chains, you notice that 80% or more of the “issues” resolved themselves? There’s a lesson there.

Own your life (work and otherwise). Own your time. Make conscious choices about how you want to spend it and what’s important to you. Put down the iPhone every once in a while. Set your priorities and don’t let yourself be distracted from them by what’s new and shiny. It’s trite, but no one ever said, on her deathbed: “Why did I spent all that time with my friends and family? Why didn’t I spend more time on my Droid?”

Edited May 25 to add: Amber Naslund (aka @ambercadabra) has a great blog post about how she keeps herself organized and together in 10 relatively simple (but not necessarily easy) steps.

Social Media as Religion

Posted on March 1, 2010 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment

One of the most fun parts of Untech10 was the end of the day tweetaway session. Everyone was asked to capture their top takeaway from the day in 140 characters or less. Mine was:

“socmed doesn’t have rules – it has religions – need 2 provide diff spaces 4 devotees of diff sects (inc agnostics)”

This is nearly a direct quote (shortened for Twitter) of a statement made during the opening “fishbowl” session. It struck me as a really profound observation.

I’m not going to try to get too clever with this borrowed analogy, but while those of us who are involved in social media tend to operate in more than one space, I’d bet that most of us have a home platform that is our primary social media outlet. It’s the one that’s always open when your computer’s on and is the first thing you check – the first app you installed on your smartphone – the one people accuse you of being “addicted” to. And, much like different religions and denominations, they each have their own rules, norms, and ways of interacting.

In some ways, this is just another way of expressing the “LinkedIn is the business meeting, Facebook is the hallway conversation, Twitter is the cocktail party” concept so many of us are familiar with. Except there is a certain level of dogmatism attached to the platforms – not only is my favorite one my favorite one, it’s also the RIGHT one to be using for X, Y, and Z reasons.

So if you’re a LinkedInian, it’s the RIGHT one because Twitter’s ratio of signal to noise is too low and Facebook is too silly (Farmville overload, anyone?). Likewise, if you’re a Tweep, it’s the RIGHT one because you can pay attention to anyone you want to unlike Facebook that requires them to follow you back, and because it’s concise, immediate and engaging, unlike the LinkedIn business rolodex and resume focus. And on and on.

But much like with religion, the audience you’re trying to engage is likely to be a mix of different faiths. And you don’t have the option of just not talking about it in polite company.

So what do you do?

First of all, it’s important to acknowledge that there are agnostics/atheists in the Church of Social Media. Which means you have to maintain traditional ways of engaging, communicating, and marketing in addition to playing with all your shiny new socmed toys.

Secondly, you need to know your audience. What socmed faith do they pledge? And what does that say about how they want to engage with you and each other and what they’re looking for out of their interactions?

Third, remember that religion inspires passion. What are you doing to tap into the passion of your community and enable them to express it? Who are your proselytizers?

Finally, don’t confuse your own role. You’re not an evangelist for a particular faith – you’re a professor of comparative religion. Your task is to help your congregants understand the options available to them and see the core truth in all: these tools exist to help us find new ways of connecting with each other. (But I won’t make you sing Kumbaya.)

On the Importance of Unplugging

Posted on January 21, 2010 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 8 Comments

Or, as Phil Baumann would call it, “defraging,” and thanks to @EdBennett for the link.

It seems like I end up musing on this topic at least once a year. This go round was motivated by watching a bunch of my colleagues get to the end of the year scrambling with their “use or lose” vacation. And NACHRI has VERY generous carry over policies, so it’s not like we can only carry a week. Why is this a good thing? Around here, it definitely does NOT come from the top, as our CEO provides a good model of work-life balance, particularly when it comes to truly vacationing (as opposed to “going on vacation” but taking your Blackberry and laptop).

Studies have demonstrated that being “always on” can produce serious depression and lead to shallow relationships. Technology, particularly social media technology, can eat your life if you let it. It’s almost addictive, to the point that Firefox includes add-ons that will control it for you, if you can’t for yourself. And it may exacerbate problems like ADD/ADHD.

Constantly checking our email, FB updates, or Twitter stream precludes contemplation, deep conversations, “flow” states, and being in the moment – we’re too busy worrying about all the *other* moments we might be missing. And in the meantime, we’re missing *our* moments.

I’m not saying dump all technology or social media. I’m just encouraging us all to think about both the benefits and the costs all this convenience brings us. Every person has to decide what the right balance of on/off is for herself. But be honest with yourself – are your online relationships hurting your face-to-face relationships? When was the last time you put away the computer and the smart phone for a week – or even a day? Did you lose any vacation because you “didn’t have time” to take it last year? When was the last time you sat in silence and watched something of nature? When was the last time you took a walk without a phone or iPod? When was the last time you read a novel – or an actual print newspaper? When was the last time you went out with your significant other – or best friend – and both of you turned off your cell phones for the evening?

KiKi’s encouraging us to think about a Tech Detox, too. Go to her blog to offer your ideas about what that would include for you.

Twitter Story: Fundraising

Posted on December 1, 2009 | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I have to admit, I don’t have a story to relate about using Twitter for fundraising. And in fact, the whole issue of social media and fundraising is a bit problematic, to say the least.

A lot of cause-related nonprofits were really excited about the potential of the Facebook causes app – until they realized that, while it’s pretty easy to get people to join/be a fan of your cause, it’s not so easy to actually get them to open their wallets – Facebook causes provide a very weak sense of affiliation.

Blogging is a great way to raise awareness of issues (just Google changeblogging if you don’t believe me), but again, most blogs don’t see enough traffic to generate a lot of cash (and I’m not even talking about fundraising asks here – I’m talking about ads, product placements, and endorsements).

You know what’s still the most effective way to fundraise? Direct mail. You know what’s still the second most effective way to fundraise? Email campaigns. No skool like the old skool.

But some organizations have experienced success using SMS, and that leads us to Twitter. Much like it’s older sibling, Twitter can be a great way to raise microfunds. Now for the average association, microfunds may not be worth it – the funds we need to raise tend to be more in the major donor/capital campaign arena or be related to advocacy work (which comes with a whole range of legal requirements that would be tough to verify in 140 characters), so getting $5 here and $10 there may not seem worth the trouble.

But Twitter provides, as always, another platform to get the word out. Are you going to recruit a major donor through Twitter? Probably not. But you can use it as another method to maintain your relationship with an existing major donor. Can you run a capital campaign entirely on Twitter? Probably not. But you can use it as another way of spreading the word about your campaign and providing campaign updates. Can you do your silent auction 100% on Twitter? Probably not. But you could allow people who aren’t present to bid via tweet. And if you have a compelling story and a connected group, you’d be amazed at what you can accomplish in a short amount of time.

And I haven’t even touched on the concept of Twestivals.

What is your organization doing to get the word out about your fundraising goals? Could Twitter help?

Contact Elizabeth Weaver Engel, M.A., CAE