ClearContext Corporate Blog

MacLean’s published an article last week on Intel’s quiet time pilot.  I like this idea a lot better than Email Free Fridays:

‘Quiet Time, which began in September, happens each Tuesday at two of Intel’s U.S. sites (they won’t reveal exactly where). From 8 a.m. to noon, the 300 engineers and managers in the test group set email and instant messaging to off-line mode, forward all calls to voice mail, and hang “do not disturb” signs at their cubicle entrances. They’re then free to do “thinking work,” says Intel IT principal engineer Nathan Zeldes, the man behind the project. “These guys are designing products, so I would hope they’d devote it to that,” he says. “Although I’m sure some of them are tempted to clean out their inboxes.”‘

This is basically institutionalizing the Succeed step of the IMS process; forcing employees to block out times of the day to focus on project based work rather than responding to constant interruption.  And it’s clear from the article that this type of break from the outside world is required to get real work done:

‘Today’s knowledge workers can expect just three minutes of uninterrupted work on any given task, suggests research from Gloria Mark and Victor M. Gonzalez at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s bad for innovation,” Mark says. “To be able to think very deeply, you do need quiet time.”‘

Three minutes?  I suspect this is why all my most creative ideas come when I’m walking to work rather than when I’m sitting at my desk.

Thanks to customer Philip who forwarded along this article!  Most appreciated…

Microsoft has posted how Bill Gates Office 2007 throughout the day.  Not surprisingly, Bill spends most of his time in Outlook:

"I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners."

"It’s very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive."

At least Bill has the luxury of assistant(s) to help out.  Read the rest of the post for other interesting tidbits (for example, he just started using tasks in Outlook this year…).

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame has written an interesting article titled “The Future of Ignoring Things” for Internet Evolution.  His basic premise – computers have done such a good job of helping us remember things that now we need to put them to work on helping us to ignore.  In particular, he talks about about implementing an email feature reminiscent of the Unsubscribe function in IMS Pro:

“Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference and founder of the startup AskSandy, once proposed an “ignore thread” feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting, and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The problem is that threads mutate. Last week’s dinner plans become this week’s discussion of next year’s group holiday. If the thread is still going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox — and a single click takes you back through all the messages you missed.

We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a gray zone between “delete on sight” and “show this to me right away.”

This type of strategy is necessary due to the huge volume and high cost of interruptions; well documented in Intel’s analysis of the impact of Informania.  At ClearContext we continue to focus our core products and energies on eliminating this issue and “showing people the right way.”