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Information Rage Coming Soon To an Office Near You
digitaldc submitted the latest excuse to get a few days off: "A survey released this week revealed the latest affliction to hit white-collar workers. It's called 'information rage,' and almost one in two employees is affected by it. Overwhelmed by the torrent of data flooding corporate workplaces, many are near the breaking point.
The aftermath of all this is the deterioration in quality that occurs when flustered employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard. Almost three quarters of the survey's respondents declared their work has suffered as a result."
My first post, and it's from work, and I'm fucking RAGING!
I don't have time for all this.
Their they're doing there hair.
people are not machines. they need to be replaced.
I've got all this work to do, and you're bothering me with THIS?!
As a long time worker in a G8 tax department, information overload has been going on for years. People get pissed because they don't have the best tools for the job, but I've never seen 'rage'.
"It's not our fault that we falsified 103,000 notarized documents, committing an act of perjury each time. It was information overload."
I find if I start getting too much e-mail I just start ignoring it until someone actually talks to me either over the phone or in person. I mean, staying connected is one thing but having a team of about 10 people constantly CC'ing each and every member on every possible topic is bloody useless.
Believe me I don't want to ignore information but I honestly don't have time to go through hundreds of e-mail every day and pick out the ones that are actually meant for me based on context or content. I actually have a job outside sorting e-mail (odd I know).
Am I crazy here?
I suspect the issue is more "Foster's overload" than "information overload."
employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard
I'd think this is the human condition, at least since the invention of the printing press.
In addition, everybody has a level at which they can effectively cull information, and a level of work that individually and organizationally is considered 'standard'. Unless more information actually produces a lower quality of work than a smaller amount of information -- with the same distribution of relevance -- would.
It seems like this would boil down to prioritization more than anything else.
I believe this has been a problem since the beginning of time. When managers see this "symptom" they need to "hire an additional employee". Some people might even say that managing employees workloads is the job of management.
Too much information compressed into a very short advert (or "ad" on this side of the Atlantic) caused the neural system to go haywire and the TV viewer to explode in a horrid disgusting death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
and
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3083938335651439831#
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
It's survival of the fittest, I guess. It just makes my high-quality work stand out even more.
THAT'S why they are submitting sub-standard work.
Some people suffer analysis paralysis, other suffer from the 'where do I start' problem and give up.
David Allen talks about this in Getting Things Done, and what most people have on their plates are lots of amorphous blobs of stuff, not actionable items. So the first step is to break up big blobs into little actions, then take the first action.
Another thing Allen says when most people say they don't have enough time, its not really time its how they use/don't use it that matters.
If you're willing to accept the above as true and act on that information, things will get better.
He's also got some ideas about meetings that are similar to what Randy Pausch said not in the last lecture, but his lecture on time management. Pausch didn't go to meetings if there wasn't an agenda prepared. Allen always asks for next steps 15 minutes before the meeting is over because if no one is taking action to fix the problem you'll have the same meeting over and over until someone does.
I'm sorry, but where exactly does the rage part come in? There's a lot of work to do, people get lazy, skip it, and submit things without properly checking everything they should. That's laziness, apathy, or simply being bad at their job. If there was any rage, I imagine that things would be smashed and people would drop kick printers, possibly to rap music.
Wait a second, this isn't some lame attempt to have a "road rage" analogy in an office environment is it? That's just a sad attempt at crafting buzz-words, and you should feel bad for it.
No, Sir. It is my professional opinion that you have a touch of the "Information Rage." Take 2TB and post back in the morning.
Personally, I do the opposite; I encourage emails and discourage phone and walk-ins. With email, you can safely disregard it for a while and get back to it later, but not so much the other two methods. I've been at my new job since April and have yet to connect to the voicemail system and initialize my box. I'm that frickin' serious about not taking phone calls. Wait... Am I crazy here?
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I just tend to ignore people and channels of information that prove irrelevant or uninteresting.
In fact I end up "archiving" most of this information and only focus on discussion relating to important things or people at work.
Then again, in an poorly run organization where authority isn't clearly delineated or understood, people can often have too many "important people" (TPS reports anyone?). If that kind of situation isn't kept in check (either by the worker or the organization), it will lead to burnout and turnover.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire...
Paralysis by analysis is what we always called it. You can't get anything done because you have to large amount of information about every decision available to decide and even if you can you want to wait for more data in hopes making a better decision. Eventfully you just end up feeling impotent because nothing is happening; next you just start doing stuff without considering any information just to see something actually happen.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Filters are your friend. Forward anything not directly sent to you (i.e., you are a Cc/Bcc) to a holding folder. Of you need to dig out a specific message, you'll have it. Otherwise, you can ignore them all until you have time to get to them (which could be never).
The only thing worse than getting 100 emails a day, is having 100 walk-up or phone interruptions asking if you got the email that you ignored. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
- Choruses from "The Rock" (1934)
Well, maybe not really. I can understand that folks are overwhelmed by all the personalized shit that's thrown at them at an increasing pace, without them ever having to get a chance to understand the art of manipulation (I blame poor schooling).
Non the less, I get the impression that actual information content in our daily data stream gradually reduces. I guess what these people don't understand is that they are reduced to a commodity, and it's only possible because they never learned to sort through the shit that's coming their way.
I see this as another indication that our time will be seen as a very dark one in the information society.
Based on the current trends and some numbers pulled out of my rectum, I'd say the realization point and adaption of general consciousness will happen in around 150 years. Man, I hope I'm worng!
Now just teach 10,000 people the difference between TO: and CC:, and you have yourself a winner. :)
If any of my coworkers broke down and went into a savage fit of rage due to information overload, I would be ecstatic. The resulting incident would be YouTube gold. I'd have a great story to tell my nieces. My employer would start doing more to ensure that I was happy at work. In other words, this sounds like a big win! =)
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Here's a mental exercise for the problem. Treat all your data sources like they were petulant little children. All of them are screaming for your attention, and you should acknowledge they exist, but you can only actually pay attention to one at a time. Once you've fixed one child's problem as well as you can, move on to the next one. If that child starts screaming again, well, you'll get back to him at some point in the rotation. If one of the children comes up to you and he's lit on fire, prioritize!
I learned to look first at the source of incoming mail. Ignoring anything from management helped me cope with finding relevant information.
There's a surplus of workers out there. Simply make handling information overload another qualification for the job. People who can otherwise do excellent work, but can't handle a deluge of irrelevant facts can just find a job picking apples at $15/barrel.
I write that with tongue-in-cheek, some sarcasm, and some irony, but unfortunately it may well be THE solution for some employers. Aside from the waste of good workers, part of management's responsibility is setting up a productive working environment. With this solution they may well be casting off workers better able to handle the job desired in favor of workers better able to wade an ocean of irrelevant distractions. The proper working environment would help shield workers from those distractions, allowing better work to be done.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Dom Portwood: Hi, Peter. What's happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. The coversheet. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it.
Dom Portwood: Yeah. Did you get that memo?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. And the problem is just that I forgot the one time. And I've already taken care of it so it's not even really a problem anymore.
Dom Portwood: Ah! Yeah. It's just we're putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that'd be great. All right!
"... flustered employees -- unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough -- end up submitting work that's substandard. Almost three quarters of the survey's respondents declared their work has suffered as a result."
-- but they filled out the survey without any problems?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Too much information? Get a better tool to handle it.
Not in digital formats? Hire data-entry folks at minimum wage.
Can't find the information you want in the sea of other information? Hire a librarian!
Librarians don't just deal with books anymore. They're highly-trained specialists in the field of information organization and retrieval. Conveniently, thanks to budget cuts and changing usage, there are a LOT of librarians looking for jobs right now, and they'll take relatively-cheap salaries, too. Large companies can't afford not to have a librarian.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
What the fuck does that mean?
... welcome our new Information Overloads.
in the name of evolution... we'll force our brains to process more information faster and faster which should result in a great leap in brain power.
Conducted by LexisNexis, the survey of 1,700 people identified dejection and frustration as prominent emotions among 49 per cent of respondents, who admitted they're unable to manage all the information coming their way. Of those, 51 per cent said they're close to giving up.
Ok let me get this straight you asked a bunch of people if they were unable to handle the all the information coming their way and most said "yes". First of all, what does that even mean? Is it email? Really? We've had email as a part of business for over a decade and most people can't quickly determine if they need to read a message or not? Are these the people who keep spammers in business? Don't get me wrong, I've been overworked but that was about having too much to actually produce or to be interrupted too frequently but I don't see what that has to do with the informational content. Nor does it answer how the alleged deluge of information creates poor quality work. Wouldn't having more information than you need (assuming this information is work related if it isn't apply a similar -mental- filter to the one you use for spam). On the other hand having more work to do in a day at a particular level of quality than is reasonable to expect - i.e. Being Overworked would logically have a reduction of quality as a potential outcome.
I mean how do we know that most people aren't simply overworked (which seems a reasonable assumption to me anyway) and all this survey did was determine who considers their workload to be "information" and who doesn't.
accountant with horn-rimmed glasses. He didn't know how many pull-ups he could do because he had never done any.
He was overwhelmed with the deluge of information.
When he couldn't keep it in his cubicle any longer, he starting taking off his glasses on off-work hours, and resorted to drive-by Firesheeping, destruction of any and all HP printers flashing PC LOAD LETTER, and MITM attacks for kicks.
He was Info-Man.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I do the same since e-mail is documentation (CYA) and it's much easier to prioritize. My office phone went on the fritz more than a week ago and I really don't care when it's fixed.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I've been at my new job since April and have yet to connect to the voicemail system and initialize my box. I'm that frickin' serious about not taking phone calls. Wait... Am I crazy here?
Five plus years here, still haven't set up voicemail.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
ISTM the trick is to realise that almost none of the emails a person gets are important or even relevant. Collect the ones from your boss and your boss's boss and deal with those. Pretty much anything else can be ignored. If it really is that important, they can always phone you.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Maybe it was because the employer was being excessively cheap and only hired one trainee to do the work of two regular workers?
Or something along those lines.
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Back when I worked at Boeing (before desktop PCs), one of my mentors always had a pile of paper in his in-basket that often exceeded a height of one foot. I asked him how he dealt with all that crap. His answer: If someone calls about some subject covered by a memo, he'd dig it out of the pile. After dealing with it, it would go on top. Once a week, he'd grab a hand full of paper off the bottom of the pile and throw it away.
A kind of bubble sort algorithm, I guess.
Have gnu, will travel.
Inch by inch, everything is a cinch! But there's miles of inches and mile by mile it's a huge fucking pile!
In my IT workplace we suffer from lack-of-information rage. It's where documentation is poorly organised sometimes outright hidden. Where nobody seems to anticipate anybody else actually needing or using information. Attitude issues and the protective colorization from various teams. Even less helpful is the non-IT component to the business who think and speak another language. Welcome to the corporate IT world.
Whoa, you've worked somewhere like that too?
You're the kind of person that I pay lots of personal visits to. I'm sure it makes my face a dreaded on, but I am a huge fan of going to talk to people face to face because it gets my stuff done.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
You know, it doesn't really matter. I, uh, I don't like my job. I don't
think I'm gonna go anymore. I don't know if I'll get fired, but I really don't like it so I'm not gonna go.
It won't matter much. I think Milton wants to set the building on fire. I think he'll probably do it.
I don't think I'd like another job. I never really liked paying bills. I don't think I'll do that
either. I want to take Joanna over at Chotchkie's out for dinner and then I wanna go to my apartment
and watch Kung Fu.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You're not crazy at all.
Email is abused and not used correctly for its purpose. Most projects I have worked on in the last couple of years use planning software and web interfaces to collaborate. This way, the project is broken down into manageable sections and assigned to very specific groups. All of the documentation and materials is posted to these sections and anybody can view the modifications and add or edit them. Notes, comments, etc. can be added to action items and we can see at a glance the status of any specific task.
Email cannot do this. You end up with a clusterfuck of email messages from people that can be unrelated to your specific task and multiple versions of documentation that you need to track down in 200 attachments. You need to communicate with that one vendor? Search through 5,000 emails to find his email address instead of looking through a contact list in the project management software. Email just does not make sense.
I don't experience this anymore. People that are not used to it and start the email overload with me usually get handled pretty quickly and are admonished that email is not an acceptable form of professional communication for our projects. Even the management gets onboard pretty quick because they like it more than email too. Probably something about people responding directly to their task or trouble ticket with timestamps and notes.
On the other hand I see my co-workers more worried about their fantasy sports teams than whether they've tested the latest patches before deploying them.
Seriously.
The good people ARE over-worked and over-scheduled even when they correctly manage their time.
The not-so-good people are ALSO over-worked and over-scheduled because they chose different priorities.
But how do you distinguish between the two groups from the outside? I mean, other than "which people call on which people when their projects explode".
Exactly. My co-workers do the same thing. They want to interrupt what I'm working on (no matter how time sensitive or whatever) so that THEIR issues can be handled.
It's easier for them to do that than it is for them to plan their projects so that the resources needed are available at the time they're needed.
The last place I worked, I took Wednesdays off and worked on Sundays. I got my entire week of work done in 1 day with no interruptions.
"Not enough rage." --World of Warcraft warrior.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
RAGE is when you say to yourself "too hell with the consequences" and vent on someone.
Forgetting to change the backup tapes because you are overstressed is not rage.
Deliberately "forgetting" to change them may be.
Deliberately "forgetting" to change them and erasing or altering key files as a way of telling your boss "I hate you" almost certainty is.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I prefer to use email to document who said what, when and how that got into the documentation.
Email isn't a substitute for a contact list.
But it does show you who provided which names for the contact list.
If someone sends you an additional name for the contact list, it should be placed on the contact list. It should NOT be left in email.
...They're called "computers". Perhaps office workers should be trained to use them.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This one's been fairly popular in our office, wonder why...
"I started by reasoning that anything I don't understand is easy to do"
Scott Adams says it like it is, without people realizing that there's often more truth than funny to the comics...
Ohhhh... BullSHIT. Total Bullshit.
Anybody working in IT knows that when we say we don't have enough time, most often we fucking mean it.
The problem is not how we use time, the problem is the goddamn Scotty Effect. Clueless project managers and executives just look at us and assume:
1) We are lying.
2) We are padding our time estimates to look good.
3) It's easier than what we are saying it is
4) IT are a bunch of whiny overpaid bitches and why have we not outsourced this to India yet?
5) We spend much of our day reading Slashdot.
Indeed. Depending upon the job checking the email a couple times a day, or possible hourly is usually enough. The real problem with it though is getting other people on the same page as to what is and is not an emergency. Some idiots flag every email they send as urgent.
Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. Information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves. Technological fucking civilization. But we still have all this shit, because we can't live without it.
Horror! Panic! Run!
I'm with you.
I do have voicemail working...and many if not most of my calls go to it.
While at my desk, I have my shure earbuds stuffed in my hears, with the iPod playing away.
I do not hear the phone when it rings...and if anyone walks in my cube, they have to basically shoot a flare gun off to get my attention.
I can get work done this way without interruptions, aside from the periodic breaks from typing when a particularly great song is on, and I have to sporadically airband a guitar or drum solo.
Email...alerts pop up at the bottom of my screen which I glance at...if it is important I'll look at it....etc.
People talking to me in meatspace, or on the phone...break concentration, stop me at times not of my convenience or choice. I prefer email. I'll get back to you when I take a break or change albums.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And you're the type of person I point to my earbuds stuffed into my ears, and tell you I can't hear, to send me an email and I'll get back to ya.
With me...an email will get you quicker action than coming into my cube, interrupting my train of thought and current work because you think your stuff has immediate priority over what I'm currently working on, and everyone else with work queued up in front of you who submitted it earlier.
Why don't you trust my judgement as to what work requires priority?
You assume your question about a SQL statement overrides my current work to restore a server that crashed and is preventing, let's say PAYROLL information from getting processed?
Hmm....that's a toughie for sure....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Sounds like America's intelligence agencies.
Join the "limited work in progress" society.
It's a simple tradgedy of the commons economic problem and it's common to many organisations. The people making the requests are not the ones paying for your time. You're free to them and it's human nature that we consume all of free resources.
It used to be that contacting people and asking them to do something was a pain. Writing letters, filling forms. There was an economic cost to doing so. Today you have email, instant messaging etc and asking other people to do stuff is easy, so you end up with vast amounts of utter crap (requests and information) being generated. Lots and lots of busy work. Put a cost onto your input. When there is a cost to your work, people will choose what they want you to do more carefully.
Things are paid for in money, you have to have money to gain service. No money, no service. However within most organisations, charging between departments is hit or miss, it's a pain to set up and a pain to run. Now, you could set up a pre-payment scheme. Create some internal money (hours of development work for example) and give them to the internal customers. When they run out of hours they don't get any more of your time.
Kanban does this by making "signalling cards" into a kind of internal currency. No card, no service. It depends how you implement it. Rather than cards, we've defined "slots". There are 2 slots per worker. When the slots are full, no more work can be requested. When it's complete, a slot is opened up. Often something stalls, which is why 2 per person rather than one.
Well, fairly quickly it becomes apparent that some work is (much) more valuable to the business than other work... And very quickly priorities are created and these fill the slots, the junk work simply doesn't get requested. It also becomes easy to track how long different types of work really take, any ticket system can do this. Real bottlenecks in the business throughput instantly become blindingly apparent to management.
It's a very simple concept, you pull the work you can do instead of staring at a mountain of work that other people push. The same for information. Pull what you need, ignore crap that others push. Pull vs push.
Deleted
I log into my account every two weeks simply to fill out my timesheet. And I only do that because I have no printer at home, otherwise I would really have no reason to ever log in. And since I'm already logged in, I might as well take the time to run Mail and empty the Inbox. If a mail header happens to catch my curiosity in the 2 seconds it takes to send all new messages to trash, I might be bothered to actually read it. But for the most part they go straight to trash. If anyone needs info from me, they can come and talk to me in person (preferable) or call (please don't).
And no, I don't check work email outside of the workplace. I don't work for free.
I encourage Corporate IM. Faster than e-mail, can't become a huge e-mail chain with half the company CC'd and limits people to communicating only what's relevant (due to laziness, of course).
I work for a fairly large corporation. If you call somebody, you will usually reach their voicemail (everyone is given a VoIP phone number and a voicemail by default). They will only answer if they owe you a lot or if they are in a VERY good mood in that moment. But IM... that's something else.
Our corporate IM knows when you have a meeting in Calendar and automatically puts your account in DND mode (regardless how you manually set your client). One can still write IMs to you, but they'll pop up after your meeting ends. If you lock your machine, you're automatically being set to away. After business hours (which you define in the system), it automatically sets you to Extended Away (if your machine is locked). So I have a very good chance to know if someone's free, in a meeting, away or gone home.
E-mail is to be used for meaningful communications addressed to groups of people who are interested due to their job specifics. That part is fulfilled by mailing lists. The e-mail source can be either an individual or a generic e-mail address, created for specific purposes (corporate comms, local comms, LOB comms, office comms, floor comms, etc.).
One of the biggest problems I see after looking at how my colleagues manage their e-mail is the lack of rules. EVERYTHING comes to their Inbox, they never have time to clean it up, guess what happens. Information Rage at its best. "But-but-but I have a gazillion e-mails in my Inbox!". Yes, of you're a dumbass who can't set up a mail rule, you deserve it. I offered to help out many people with setting up rules, they said "I don't have time for this". Well guess what, you make up those 2 hours spent on creating rules in 2 days worth of e-mails.
I have 147 e-mail rules now and I add a couple every week or so. They are split into two types: local rules and server rules; server rules prevail, because I use multiple clients in multiple locations. Anything that doesn't fit a rule comes into my Inbox for review. Everything else comes in its own specific mail folder. Once a month I move old mails to a Local Folder which I back up.
Profit!
The results are impressive (to my management chain and colleagues at least). I can pull up any message, no matter how old, in a matter of minutes (and I have 8+ GB of it after 3.5 years of work) and follow up on it if needed. I can cover my ass anytime by pulling out a sent e-mail if someone asks why didn't this happen (and usually it's their fault, and this way I can prove that to them). The e-mails are well indexed, with priorities and so on.
You want a summary from 2 years ago telling this story about that team in those locations? Give me 5 minutes and I produce a dozen e-mails about it. No headaches, no rage, no "can't".
Took me days to set up this system, indeed, but it paid its value many times over since then.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
What collaboration software did you like the most? My company produces massive detailed design documents, and during the editing phase, I end up getting an e-mail thread with billions of 12MB attachments. It's unmanageable, and I'm really trying to move us away from it. The office staff refuses to even consider Google Docs, so that's not an option.
I would say Knowledge workers, not necessarily managers.
And I've made the objection quite clear for years, unless you make widgets, more hours doesn't always mean more work. So yeah there is fundamental difference in production and management.
There is a subtext in Allen's book that he works a lot with self employed folks and higher productivity usually means more time to consult, more sales, etc for them. They are the product, so they can't easily farm out the work, and so maximizing time is the best strategy available to them.
flustered employees — unable to sort through a pile of information fast enough — end up submitting work that's substandard
Does anyone else think this is a lame assumption? As if the results of some survey, for example, would be less accurate when provided with additional preliminary information. That's just scientifically wrong.
Perhaps a more likely assumption is that employees "feel" that their work is substandard because they are not able to parse through all the input that is now available to them compared with limited sources of the same information prior to the information network.
In other words: when an employee is given a magnitude more of information to base a report on... when they are rushed for time, they will just produce a report that is a subset of that magnitude of information. Thus returning the quality of the report to exactly what it would have been prior to the increase in information. So the work would be substandard to what it could have been, but on par with the standard of work prior to the additional information sources. This is a perceptional problem on the part of the worker and/or manager... not a reduction in the quality of work (IMO).
Conclusion: the availability of additional information is a huge boon for making more informed managerial decisions. The only negative impact would be for companies who depended on information to remain proprietary in order to maximize profits. The real negative aspect is not the quality of parsed information will go down... but rather it is that some managers do not understand that the time to produce a report is proportional to the inputs used in generating that report.
It's called bureaucracy, folks. In other words, the workers are sick of the procedural bullshit, various bullshit memos, useless uninformative emails that border on irrelevancy to the actual job, and things like that. Read the article.
It's a shame LexisNexis called it "information rage." The right name for this phenomenon is "bureaucracy rage."
I guess LexisNexis wanted a synergistic term that inspires forward-looking confluence of business values, hence "information rage" signifier.
As someone impacted by "information rage", let me just say I support this article's findings.
Now excuse me while I go wash my keyboard. I appear to have inadvertently bludgeoned a coworker with it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Some people stress out and perform poorly, some people write their own tools, some people just brake and drop out.
I wonder how the Linux Kernel Team manages this?
Maybe they don't use exchange?
Just kidding, they viciously flame those who waste their time. Ranting until someone's ears fall off is the only real way to respond.
See subject-line above, & I meant it in a GOOD way... lmao, "info man" (because whatever it is you are smoking or drinking? This entire site could use some (including myself)).
APK
Its not called Information rage, for the culturally illerate,
its called Future Shock, and it was predicted. DUH!!!
I can tell you that for me, the fun is in dropping humor in as an AC (thereby not using my karma advantage for visibility) and seeing whether it gets to +5. It used to be much easier - the new default interface definitely gives AC's less visibility (why, I'm not sure).
Still, once in a while, I can still get it up.
I mean the weight that rings the bell, of course ;-) .
The amount of information one receives is relative to to the number of job descriptions that are folded into the one that describes ones position. Almost everyone, especially in a tech position, has a job description that reads like a department roster.
but I admit I don't like having to explain complex data relationships to the tester.
This is not a troll Its actually astute!
Mod Parent +1 Pleeeeeezzzzeeeee
I don't bother people about 'how to' questions. I bother them about the specification that they haven't reviewed for two weeks without any response, or for the quick technical information that I have been waiting for that receives no e-mail response. The people that I have to visit most often usually openly admit that they do not go through all of their e-mail. If that's the case, and you don't answer your phone, then I have no choice but to ignore those options from the start and go directly to you face-to-face. Anything else would be wasting both our time.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
It's not good to have music so loud in your ears that you can't hear what's happening around you. Get yourself noise-cancelling headphones instead. I've heard good things about the QC-15 from a friend.
Agreed. Earbuds aren't meant to be used more than a few minutes a day without starting to cause damage, especially at volumes intended to drown out all other noise. If you're having that much trouble focusing, you should try more coffee or some other method. Noise canceling headphones are an excellent compromise however.
moox. for a new generation.
Yeah sure, like that doesn't take time to do properly either. "F--- off d00d U suck" is not a proper rant.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I sift through 6000 articles daily, it's a breeze, For unix I use akregator, for windows jet brains omea rss reader, both have easy to use key word search which is why they are my favorites. Also put sharepoint behind the firewall at work and use an rss feed reader to keep up with everyone at work. it's all free and the way I cope
The corporate drones will go psycho, start killing each other until their information flow slows down enough to allow them to return to business as usual.
I don't play them loud.
These are Shure EC530's...they're in the ear canal monitors....you stuff them in, and even without music playing on them, you can't hardly hear anything with them in.
They function quite well as noise cancelling...great on flights too...the airplane just disappears, and they are fairly low powered, since they are in the ear canal...my iPods seem to have longer battery life with these than the stock earphones.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........