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."

Comments

TL;DR

[fotoguzzi]

I don't have time for all this.

Re:TL;DR

[mcgrew]

Those of us who are hyperlexes benefit from it, dyslexics suffer. One in two sounds about right; half the population have two digit IQs.

Gah!

[inigopete]

I've got all this work to do, and you're bothering me with THIS?!

I call shenanigans

[ip_freely_2000]

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'.

Re:I call shenanigans

[srobert]

My co-workers can't see it in me either. That's because I mutter under my breath and keep it suppressed where it can fester into a mental illness.

Re:I call shenanigans

[Stregano]

People get pissed because they don't have the best tools for the job, but I've never seen 'rage'.

Well stop bugging me about wanting green instead of blue buttons and I would have more time to get your tools done.

Re:I call shenanigans

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it isn't information at all. I usually don't mind if it's actually new information. But usually there's really very little new info.

As for tools for the job, for latency insensitive stuff I prefer emails because I read faster than most people can construct and speak coherent informative sentences on the fly. Most people don't prepare a speech before talking with other people, and if they did, they might as well prepare it in their email client and click send when they are done :).

For latency sensitive stuff I often actually prefer IM to voice. Because at least some people would realize they're typing crap before they press enter, so less crap ends up being sent. And I can more easily log what they say and do something else till the full story finally comes out :).

But for "touchy-feely" "social stuff" I guess voice is better.

Great excuse

[Wonko the Sane]

"It's not our fault that we falsified 103,000 notarized documents, committing an act of perjury each time. It was information overload."

Re:Great excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't like being informed all the time. It gets in the way of making decisions."

George W. Bush

Oh, it's Australia

[daremonai]

The researchers calculated that the average Australian employee spends less than two-and-a-half days per week actually doing their job.

I suspect the issue is more "Foster's overload" than "information overload."

Re:Oh, it's Australia

[inigopete]

...except people in Australia rarely drink Foster's itself. It's vile. More usually VB or Tooheys, but it's a pretty regional-preference thing.

Re:Oh, it's Australia

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I suspect that the lack of work comes from an excess of boring jobs that make workers feel unimportant or useless. Nobody wants to do a job of mostly busy work where they feel like the results don't matter or are not noticed. As a result, such employees will just browse the internet instead.

I know that, at least for me, if I am given the opportunity to work on a genuinely interesting project, or to provide some aspect that seems valuable to the species overall, I will actively try to reduce distractions, including the internet. If I am asked to perform the same boring, repetitive tasks over and over, or if I feel the work I am doing is, quite literally, something that the world could do just fine without, I will actively seek out distractions. That's just my 2 cents though.

Re:Oh, it's Australia

[sacdelta]

How is that any different that Americans claiming that Budweiser is beer?

Isn't this universal?

[Krishnoid]

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.

Re:Isn't this universal?

[Aladrin]

I agree. There's so much information out there that is relevant to every situation that processing it all would mean nothing ever got done. Sifting information and doing what you can with the time and resources you have is all part of the job.

I don't get why they call it 'rage', though. Are they trying to play on 'road rage' or something? Seems to me it isn't rage, but apathy that is the problem.

That is, assuming there's a problem at all. I see nothing to suggest they aren't just doing their best. And the company pays them for it accordingly.

-yawn-

Re:Isn't this universal?

[dkleinsc]

In a related news flash, researchers recently discovered that a shocking 50% of workers had performance that measured below the median.

Re:Isn't this universal?

[Andrewkov]

And these same people take 40% of their sick days on Mondays and Fridays. The bastards.

This is new?

[tthomas48]

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.

Re:This is new?

[DragonWriter]

When managers see this "symptom" they need to "hire an additional employee".

Most often, that's not what management needs to do.

Most often, what management needs to do is to fix the problem with business processes that is resulting in piles of unsorted information being generated and passed to their employees rather than actionable items. Sometimes the problem may be insufficient staff resources (but where it is, it often won't be in the place where the problem shows up, but in the place where the non-actionable information is coming in from), but most often (even when resource limitations on the data source cause the source to send bad input) the real problem management needs to address is with business processes, which adding more people won't do much to help (and certainly won't help efficiently.)

A system needs to reject information that is not of the kind it can act on at the system boundary, and needs to keep the information it can act on in a manner which facilities working on it, regardless of volume. That is just as true with a system implemented with people as one implemented with computers. While -- as is less often the case with computers, generally -- adding more human processing power can, at times, provide an inefficient way of papering over the problem of failing to reject bad input data at the system boundary, or failing to properly store acceptable input data once it is received, it still isn't a good way of addressing either problem. Its essentially the equivalent of throwing more CPUs and some complicated error correction code at a problem, when the source of the problem is bugs in the code validating and storing input data.

Re:This is new?

[tthomas48]

Yes. I call that firing bad managers. That's the other side of the token. And also doesn't get done often enough.

Agree with Parent

[Tekfactory]

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.

Re:Agree with Parent

[KingTank]

You're just saying what people who don't have too much on their plates always say about people who do have too much on their plate. And management often says the same sort of thing. Granted some workers don't manage their time well. But that doesn't change the fact that some workers simply have too much on their plates.

Re:Agree with Parent

[EdIII]

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.

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?

Guess what? I am experiencing 'information rage' right now :) Specifically at your assumption, or this Allen douchenozzle's assumption, that most often we are not managing our time right.

Nope....

The problem really is that the pointy haired bosses see a task that is reasonably a day's worth of work, assuming that we can even diagnose the problem that fast (which is fucking variable too), and they conclude, "Ohhh that's just 10 minutes tops".

There is another possibility you may not have figured out. Some people have jobs that their superiors don't understand or value and they get too much work dumped on them. Ask Slashdot how many IT people in here have experienced downsizing and then had to take on the entire workload of their missing peers? How many IT people have been in the position of being forced to work much longer hours (most often without being paid) to handle their increased workload because project managers cannot accurately estimate how long an action item really takes?

Once again, dude, I call *bullshit*.

Re:Agree with Parent

[Anonymous Coward]

David Allen talks about this in Getting Things Done

I bought that book about a year ago; haven't started it yet.

Re:Agree with Parent

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Break down your tasks into actionable items and ask management for a priority. When "Do X" becomes "Do I work on A, B, or C first?", and it is apparent that A, B, and C require nontrivial investments of resources, then it becomes more real to management. Further, in doing pieces A and B you can demonstrate progress toward completing X as a whole, whereas the nebulous "X" is either done or it is not.

This is an old technique for software project management. Take each requirement, break it into use cases, and put a level of effort next to each use case. A high-level requirement like "Add security to the app" becomes hundreds of "Restrict action A on target B to roles X,Y, and Z" use cases. Each one may take an hour. So whereas a manager might reject a blanket 100 hour estimate for "Add security to the app", showing him or her that there are hundreds of source objects to update, each of which requires checkout, modification, testing, and check-in, then the 100 hour estimate seem more reasonable. (This also shows that you put thought into the estimate and its not an off-the-cuff figure.) And if you get 8 use cases done per day, well that's measurable.

Also, if you can demonstrate a high degree of accuracy in your estimates then you will be taken more seriously. The smaller the unit of work, the more accurate the estimate. If you do 6 use cases in 6 hours (at 1 hour apiece), and then have 2 hours worth of meetings, you're still 100% accurate. Whereas if you estimate 100 hours for X and three weeks later it isn't done, then your credibility is shot. Meetings don't (usually) show up in the issue tracking system, so they aren't measurable. (The 50% or 75% devoted argument is not very effective in my experience.)

I used to say that I didn't have time to do the administrative part of development. But the reality is that I don't have time *not* to do it. Break it down and make it measurable, and then the demands (or at least the expectations) will become more realistic.

Re:Agree with Parent

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Project Manager, I interpret this a little differently.

First off - I agree with you. Clueless PM's do those things.

OTOH, smart PMs make your life easier. They don't waste your time by giving you ambiguous specs without supporting, easy-to-grasp graphics. They acts as a buffer between you and the clueless, so you can spend your time coding and not constantly switching gears for a feature that will never get implemented. They consult with you _before_ the spec to ask if the method they suggest works, or if there's a better way of serving the same business need. If anyone is going to pad the schedule, it darned well better be the PM to ensure higher-ups don't slash testing time as unnecessary. Plus, a smart PM knows it takes time to build trust with the people doing the actual work, but when you get there, you get a high-functioning team.

Sorry your PMs have sucked, dude.

Re:Agree with Parent

[BigBuckHunter]

The rage comes in when you're already working at 95% capacity, and something simple turns into the mother of all clusterfuck-abortions. For example: You "renew" a Verisign class3 cert, only to find out that the "renewed" cert is in fact an entirely "new" cert because Verisign changed out its intermediate CA. So a drop in file replacement becomes:

Adding the new intermediate and hash symlink to the apache truststore
Adding a FileChain directive to all affected vhosts
Notifying all of your customers that they need to update their truststores in the next 30 days if they wish to continue doing business with you
Realizing that you're going to have to repeat this maintenance for all 400 Verisign certs for the next year (because business partners require yearly renewals)
Having to go through your companies bullshit change-management process, rather than using the rubber stamp renewal template that you spent 2 days creating.
And worst of all, trying to explain all of this to your manager, who has no understanding of the concepts "encryption" and "trust".
5-10 minutes (renew, propagate file, roll apache servers, update asset management) becomes a Full time job for one year.

The majority of which could have been avoided if they had followed your advice "7 years ago" and shelled out for a wildcard cert.

Re:Agree with Parent

[hedwards]

Precisely. It's the job of management to take away work when there's too much of it and assign it to somebody else. In the case where there isn't anybody else who has the time to do it, then they need to either hire somebody else or prioritize.

Some workers are genuinely lazy, but more often what's going on is that management is trying to make due with less in the way of employees than is really necessary to do the job and fails or refuses to adjust the workload.

Re:Agree with Parent

[Maxo-Texas]

that's the difference between a manager and a lead.

the manager is handed crap and breaks it into blobs and gives it to leads.

the lead takes the blob and breaks it into action items.

The line worker takes their action item and does them.

Lately business has decided it doesn't really need managers or leads.. with predictable results.

Re:Agree with Parent

[Tekfactory]

What you're saying may in fact be true in your experience.

But if you're managing your time, getting stuff in from whomever you need to get it from, working on other stuff when you've got dependencies not being met, and kicking off output on a regular basis, you're doing everything you can.

Go home at a reasonable hour if you're overloaded, there is always tomorrow. If you're working late nights and weekends something is wrong.

If you do 99 things for the boss everyday and people keep finding 150 more for you to do, you need to have an honest discussion with your manager. If the quality of your work is not an issue a smart manager will get you help. If he's not smart, he will need at least 2 people to replace you when you leave.

One of my best bosses I ever had asked for a status every week, he asked for what we did (duh) but also what our dependencies were, any real obstacles in our way, and what we had on our schedule which was really just your to do list. These were so he could try to manage the workload, and get bodies in to help IF that was what was needed. Some tasks he understood could be farmed out, others would take longer to explain than just to do them.

RAGE somehow equals 'meh'

[HeckRuler]

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.

Re:RAGE somehow equals 'meh'

[Krishnoid]

There's a lot of work to do, people get lazy, skip it, and submit things without properly checking everything

The way I think about it is that there's X work to do, Y time to do it in, Z amount of skills, and [A .. W] amount of information coming in. You can:

• Cut corners on X
• Miss deadline Y
• Do the best you can with Z
• Or process and cull information from [A .. something less than W]

You could apply the 'Meh' principle to any of these.

Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois

[countSudoku()]

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?

Call it what it is... spam

[rsborg]

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.

Obligatory

[Yvan256]

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

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Paralysis by analysis

[smooth wombat]

next you just start doing stuff without considering any information just to see something actually happen.

That's SOP for our management. Just a series of random edicts without any understanding of what needs to be accomplished in the vain hope that if you throw enough of them together, something wonderful will happen.

I Hope this is True

[BJ_Covert_Action]

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! =)

Re:I Hope this is True

[blair1q]

First thing your employer would do is ban cameras in the workplace.

Second is to buy thicker chains.

Hmm...

[sootman]

"... 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?

Fix it with librarians!

[Sarten-X]

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.

PC Load Letter?

[Yvan256]

What the fuck does that mean?

I, for one,

[Anonymous Coward]

... welcome our new Information Overloads.

He was a mild-mannered

[Compaqt]

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.

Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois

[El Torico]

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.

The cure is simple

[fr_archaeus]

Stop abusing your productivity and relying on 20th century data flows! Treat yourself to a jolly glass of old fashioned, sunshiny Analytics. That's right. Business Intelligence, Extract-Transform-Load-Aggregate-Analyze-Visualize Analytics is not just for statisticians and MBAs any more. It's got 47% better lift than Ouija or Anger Management classes! Treat yourself to an evaluation version of Oracle OBIEE, MS SQL Server or Pentaho. WARNING: Use of analytics can result in predictable results, amazing margin increases and overal sense of well being. Side effects include increase in storage and use of IT consultants (this message is sponsored by your local storage and IT consultant vendors)

Re:The cure is simple

[Sarten-X]

Now, instead of having nicely-organized information including business practices, already-solved problems, and the one vital flaw in the last Widget production batch, you have a million-row database table that's only accessible by a few select folks. Since they take a few months to make a custom report (because they're already so busy), it's easier and faster to go back to the original sources. Now you just have more information, redundantly duplicated.

Re:The cure is simple

[zero0ne]

Sounds like our ticketing system based on some CA crap.

Gotta love it that it can store all this info about who touched what ticket, when they did, how much time they spent, who they transferred it to, when it was opened / closed / delayed etc... Yet they give us no real way to see the data it is collecting.

Oh yay! I can now add how much time i spent on my tickets... but guess what I can't see any aggregate statistics on how well I am doing...

So what have I been forced to do? create a python script to parse the only report you can see (just a big ole table!!!! YAY) and import it into my own database so I can actually get a better idea where i am spending my time!
(did I really spend 15 hours replacing keyboards this week!)

Nothing new

[PPH]

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.

Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois

[JWSmythe]

    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.

Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois

[EdIII]

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.

Maybe.

[khasim]

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".

Re:Maybe.

[war4peace]

If you can't distinguish between the two, why would you be a manager?

Re:Maybe.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Be careful. Procrastinating, lack of attention and goofing off can be a sign of a pending burn-out or being overworked. It isn't always, but I've seen it happen. A busy and usually diligent guy on a job that had already burned out another co-worker, has a few urgent but very do-able tasks in his inbox, some of which he could have handled or delegated in minutes... but he just sat there, then opened another browser window. And that went on for a few days, during which time very little work left his hands. After that he called in sick and didn't return to the job. Pretty sad...

You're right, it is hard to tell which is which. The guy who just moved in on your project and appears to be a slacker could already be on the verge of being overworked from his previous assignment. Very hard to tell, and the warning signs are often overlooked. In the past 2 years I've seen 4 cases of burn-out happen around me, and I've been close myself.

Substandard != RAGE

[davidwr]

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.

Forgot one option

[PlazMan]

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.

Kanban - Solves (some of) this problem

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:Kanban - Solves (some of) this problem

[BotnetZombie]

Just one thing missing - the person making a request must not be the same as the one setting its priority. Everyone thinks their stuff is most important.

Re:Constant e-mail bombardment (aka signal to nois

[war4peace]

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.

It's not information that they're angry at

[aeoo]

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.