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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article asking if intranets are making professors stupid. The article starts out focusing on e-mail and quickly drills down to identify all the time-wasters that turn expensive faculty members from productive, professional thinkers to unproductive, amateur administrators.
A subtler factor arose as an unexpected side effect of the introduction of "productivity-enhancing" networked personal computers to professional life. As the economist Peter G. Sassone observed in the early 1990s, personal computers made administrative tasks just easy enough to eliminate the need for dedicated support staff — you could now type your own memos using a word processor or file expenses directly through an intranet portal. In the short term, these changes seemed to save money. But as Sassone documents, shifting administrative tasks to high-skilled employees led to a decrease in their productivity, which reduced revenue — creating losses that often surpassed the amount of money saved by cuts to support staff. He describes this effect as a diminishment of "intellectual specialization," and it's a dynamic that's not spared higher education, where professors spend an increasing amount of time dealing with the administrative substrate of their institutions through electronic interfaces.
We can actually quantify the background hum of busyness that Knuth so assiduously avoids. In 2014, the Boise State anthropologist John Ziker released the results of a faculty time-use study, which found that the average professor spent a little over 60 hours a week working, with 30 percent of that time dedicated to email and meetings. Anecdotal reports hint that this allocation has only gotten worse over the past five years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:17AM (9 children)
In the article's rant about e-mail, I would posit that the main gripe is not with e-mail but with exceedingly poor interfaces such as M$ Outlook and all web mail UIs. Top posting by default is just one example: one brief moment of savings for the first recipient turns into stress and chaos for everyone else later in the exchange.
Web mail as an interface for mail, really sucks and reduces the return on effort by several orders of magnitude. I watch people struggle and struggle with web mail, yet they assert that it is easy. However, in regards to triage and managing the message, they take many tens of minutes to get done what would have taken only a few minutes in a dedicated mail client, such as Mutt, Alpine, Sylpheed, or Thunderbird. My guess is that what they mean by "easy" is that it is familiar. However, it hurts to even watch them waste their efforts so badly. If you extrapolate that to every mail user in an organization, company, or other institution, then the web interface for mail causes one hell of a loss of productivity for society.
The solution is not necessarily to ditch e-mail, but to enforce use of efficient interfaces, plus actually give a little training or orientation in those interfaces so that rather than thumb-fingering their way around they can become productive power users. It has to be done cleverly though. Most people will assert that they already know how to use e-mail even if they don't do more than routined, ritualized flailing about. It's not something that can be done individually, it has to be applied to groups of people collaborating. However, it is quite cool to see the light go on when they realize methods which save them time and work.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:51AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:14PM (1 child)
> ... exceedingly poor interfaces such as M$ Outlook ...
tl,dr version: Reduce your productivity with Windows.
Phrase first heard from an ace game programmer in Silicon Valley, back when Win 3.0/3.1 was getting traction.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:47PM
Since my earliest days working (1991), I became and remain convinced that Microsoft has engineered a virtual treadmill, or hamster wheel if you like, designed to keep people who use their products constantly scurrying to keep up with meaningless, worthless, but essential to function changes that they release on a schedule designed to change as fast as the market will bear.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:44PM (1 child)
We used to use Eudora, it was great (for its day). Anymore, we're on Gmail and MS Office because a) we have device proliferation, multiple desktops, phone, occasional tablets, occasional login from random terminals, so the cloud based interface is at least consistent, and b) when you work for a megacorp, you don't get to opt out of MS Office.
Even if the world used Thunderbird, or whatever, and Thunderbird came up to the highest levels of functionality, multi-terminal availability, etc. most people just don't know how to use that power, and just don't care. Before Eudora came out, I identified e-mail clients as one of the most lacking and most needed applications out there - I even bought a book on SMTP and dabbled at the idea of writing something a lot like Eudora, it wasn't out of reach for a one-man-show back then. The problem is: people don't care. They use Facebook messenger, not because it's great, but because it's the path of least resistance.
Now, what would be nice would be a live-in assistant who gets up at 8am, sorts my spam, brings me the most pressing communications, and doesn't embezzle from me (because they're paid enough that they don't need to.) Oh, and they can also do the laundry and watch the children when we're busy doing other things. But, even Ph.D. Principal engineers with 30 years of specialty industry experience don't draw enough salary to begin to afford such a thing, these days, particularly when basic trades like plumbing, electricians, auto maintenance, roof repair, etc. all charge more per hour than the senior engineer earns in salary; I believe due to the nature of modern trade work which seems to spend as much or more time doing "free quotes" and between paying jobs as actually working the trade.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:50PM
I've been looking for a live-in, naked maid myself for a while now. I guess a boy can dream, huh?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by https on Saturday April 20 2019, @05:57PM (2 children)
Top posting saves time for the original sender who, having sent the original email in the first place, knows the god damned question already and just wants an answer.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday April 21 2019, @04:15AM
Then it's still their fault for top posting, in addition to being lazy and inconsiderate. Either way, top posting or normal, their obligation is to trim the text of the message they are responding to. There is no excuse on any level not to. It shows a lack of competence, consideration, and organization to fail to trim text.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 21 2019, @08:29PM
The email reader should place the cursor at the start of the first nonquoted text.
The email reply program should just place the cursor at the end of the quoted text.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday April 20 2019, @09:46PM
I would posit that you are wrong. The problem with email is that humans are not innately equipped to handle the amount of information we need to deal with today.
I have used both webmail and non-webmail extensively (Thunderbird, mutt, mu4e, rmail). There are no missing features that strongly impact productivity. I need to be able to reply to messages, search messages, and link to messages. Actually webmail is better than most local clients in that regard, because most of them do not support linking to specific messages and adding that link to various places for cross-referencing (mu4e and rmail do, as they benefit from being built on top of Emacs).
Email is for receiving and sending messages. It is not for building a productivity workflow around. Although you can certainly do so, complaining about an email client's ability to manage your entire productivity workflow isn't a strike against the email client, but rather your own ability to consciously recognize how you're using your tools.
I suggest reading Getting Things Done by David Allen for some insights on handling growing information demands.
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