Communications - September 2011

Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1995376.1995388
the profession of it
managing time, part 2

Masterful time management means not just tracking of messages
in your personal environment, but managing your coordination
network with others.

In a preViOUs installment of this column (March 2011) we took a new look at time man- agement from the perspective of personal productivity. 2 We focused on practices you can adopt in your personal environment to manage your time well and productively. The practices are tracking, selecting, executing, and capacity planning.

As useful as it is, a framework for personal management of commitments is not sufficient for maximum productivity. The reason is that you depend heavily on others fulfilling their commitments to you before you can complete yours. Failures or delays in the other commitments can block your productivity, cause you to take defense measures such as nagging, and sometimes force you to find other people to supply what you need. In a personal commitment management framework, you have no control over these external factors.

Interactions with others are visible in your personal framework as points where you receive requests or issue promises. Seeing those points is not the same as managing the coordination they represent. Managing interactions is crucial for productivity of the entire group, not just you. In this column we examine how the large number of messages relating to external coordination can produce an information fog that can only be dispelled by teaching yourself to observe the coordination loops you engage in with others.

information Glut

Information glut is an archenemy of productivity. When the total amount of information coming into your personal environment passes a saturation point, your productivity starts to suffer because you can no longer make sense of the information and find solid grounding for your decisions. How can you be productive when you must sort through a lot of irrelevant, marginally useful, or contradictory information?

On the broadest scale, the information fog includes all the information you might come across in the Internet.

Some of that information is discretionary—you asked for it by searching and then “pulling” search results into your environment. Pulled information does not seem to be as serious a threat to productivity as “pushed” information—sent into your environment at the action of others. Some common forms of pushed information are:

1. Spam, ads, and phishing—those who send it have no real expectation you will respond.

2.Notices, newsletters, updates, and carbon copies—others keeping you informed: (a) because you asked

figure 1. Customer C orders from a catalog of provider P. to implement the main conversation seen by the customer, the provider manages a coordination network of loops staffed by its employees and suppliers.