I was recently asked to develop a course at UCT for Business Science, called “Attention Economics”. It’s an interesting concept that looks at Human Attention as a scarce resource that has economic value.
By placing value on Attention, I hope to instill more respectful and impactful ways of communicating in business, particularly in Marketing.
Anyway, as I get more involved in education, so I get exposed to more presentations. I’ve realised that there is an art to good presenting, and so I’ve been working hard at improving my own style. I just came across this useful set of slides that I thought worthwhile to share:
Elaine just sent me some useful time-saving tips from Tim Ferris:
Nine (and growing) stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs and office workers should strive to eliminate. Mission critical stuff!
1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers
2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night
3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time
4. Do not let people ramble
5. Do not check e-mail constantly—“batch†and check at set times only
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers
7. Do not work more to fix overwhelm—prioritize
8. Do not carry a cellphone or Crackberry 24/7, seven days a week
9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should
I have 357 emails in my inbox this morning, and my finger is eerily drawn to the “mark all as read button”.
p.s. One other thing that I’m doing to reduce inbox clutter- unsubscribing from all email newsletters, and switching to RSS instead (those that are RSS enabled, that is).
On Saturday night in Cape Town we had the second of 50 fabulous parties with Jimmy Wales and Heather Ford. The idea is that these will be held bring together the open-content communities in various cities around the world.
Heather made a very exciting announcement at the event:
There is going to be a free culture house built in Cape Town. Imagine a place you can pop into for coffee, and be exposed to the latest multi-media and open content, create and remix using the latest tech and open software, learn about and organise free-culture events, or just meet other enthusiasts to work on new projects. It’s going to be the first of many around the world.
I’ve been a bit erratic on the posting lately… I guess it’s email overload – I took 3 weeks out of my usual schedule, and in the meantime a rather substantial backlog accumulated. I’m overwhelmed and frustrated. It just reminds me of my disdain for the way we use email.
I gave a lecture to an executive MBA class two weeks ago, and asked them how they deal with email. The answers were borderline ridiculous (although enlightening)! These people have so much on their plates that they can’t possibly deal with all the email that comes at them, so they need to make intuitive decisions about what to respond to… Which means that alot of opportunities are being missed. And they know it. One person in the class had four assistants to help her deal with her email – basically all she got to see of it was a small stack of printed notes every afternoon, which she would take home, makes notes on and then hand in to one of her secretaries to transcribe and send along. WTF!?
This problem isn’t going away either. I can only imagine the email overload increasing over time as the web becomes more and more integrated into people’s work and personal lives.
Solutions? Here are some common ones:
More use of Instant Messaging,
No email should be more than 5 sentences long,
Use of Wiki’s for planning among groups
Every email should be actionable and concrete.
Business and personal mail should be kept completely separate
Use social-networking sites to catch-up with old friends or associates
No more mass-mailing. Ever. Group info should be disseminated via RSS through a blog… if it’s important for people, they will opt-in for as long as it remains so.
If it’s urgent, call.
The problem with these is that they are rules, which are easy to ignore.
My idea (worth billions I reckon): what if your email inbox could be viewed as a tag-cloud rather than a list?
The sender would be obligated to tag/categorise their messages. Could this work?
I'm a Digital Media and Marketing educator based in Cape Town, South Africa.
If you're interested in booking me for a talk or workshop you can check out my formal profile on the
About page.
