them to when delegating tasks; (b) because you agreed to a subscription or to the automatic “side benefits” of online purchases; (c) because they had other reasons to inform you even though you did not ask.

3. Specific acts of coordination.

The normal way of minimizing type 1 information is to practice rapid deletion (ignoring) and use spam filters. Most people have this under control. The amount of spam or phishing expeditions reaching their inboxes is not a major source of productivity loss.

The normal way of managing type 2 information is to make requests to be excluded from distributions you do not want to be part of. If people to whom you have delegated tasks are overdoing it, you can ask them to reduce the traffic.

That leaves type 3 information as the main source of pushes that can hurt your productivity. At first glance, it looks like this information is in the form of email, phone, chat, messaging, or even wikis, and can therefore be managed with the filing and calendaring tools embedded into office productivity software. Unfortunately, this view confuses communication of messages with coordination of actions. With a good model of coordination, you can make a significant improvement in your coordination productivity in spite of the message traffic that coordination actions generate.

tem can support coordination, but is not sufficient to achieve coordination.

The fundamental building block of
coordination is the action loop. We just
summarize it here because it has been
well documented elsewhere. 1, 3, 4 A loop
connects two parties, C (customer) and
P (performer) whose actions combine
to fulfill a shared condition of satisfac-
tion. It consists of the four phases:
C: prepares and delivers a request;

P: negotiates changes and promises to deliver;

P: completes the task and delivers
the result; and
C: reviews and accepts the delivery.

Many messages can be exchanged between P and C during each phase. Tracking software can record the desired outcome and monitor progress toward completion.

Either primary party (C or P) may turn to secondary parties to fulfill subtasks for them. Thus the primary loop generates a coordination network of linked subtasks, involving other play-ers. Figure 1 shows an example.

If you do not see that you are inter-
acting with a coordination network,
your mailbox will look like a miasmic
mishmash of many messages man-
dating mindful ministration. You will
not see the loops and will not com-
plete them satisfactorily, causing you
lost time and ill will to fix the mis-
takes. Your reputation may suffer in
the process.

Coordination fog

Larger outcomes need a team of people working together to produce them. In fact, almost all organizations now work in cross-functional teams, often spread over several countries. The usual protocol for making these teams work is repeat the following cycle until the job is done: hold a coordination setup meeting and then split up to do individual tasks. The meetings can be held in person or online with a meet-

figure 2. the left figure shows what your workspace looks like during the planning stage of a project, when it looks like your part of the project is a pile of personal tasks to be managed. the right figure shows that the coordination tasks between you and others can generate hundreds of email messages, which look like “fog” if you cannot see the coordination network behind them.

Collaboration space in person, or virtually with tools like goto Meeting or Webex.

Collaboration with tools such as File Sharing, Scheduling, Basecamp, instant Messaging, and Yammer.

from Communication to Coordination

Communication is concerned with transfers of messages from senders to recipients. Coordination is concerned with people aligning their actions to achieve common goals.

It is important to make the distinction because most of the work we do is not just our own personal tasks, it is the tasks we do together with others. We refer to the orchestration of these shared tasks as “coordination.” Your productivity to a large extent depends on your skill at coordination.

Coordination depends on the parties making requests and keeping promises. The human agreements involved can be recorded, but not automated. A single coordination generates many messages among the parties involved. A good communication sys-

personal productivity Tools (for example, g TD, Xobini) help people manage, prioritize, and organize the things they must get done.

hundreds of email messages are
generated when dealing with changes,
dependencies and breakdowns;
email messages increase as the project
gets closer to fulfilling an outcome.