INFOBESITY HACKS #1 – Avoid ‘Reply All’

London. 28th October 2019 Hallo Again.

I’m going to be writing six blogs with practical ideas about how to handle the age of Infobesity. Why six? Well, that’s because I’m writing a new book about simplicity in a complex world, with 6 and the 6-sided hexagon as our perfect cut-through. If you’d like to know more, see my website and you can email me: julia@thefullyconnected.com.

Why Infobesity? Well, we are all experiencing a Social Health crisis. As in: A crisis affecting how we connect in the digital age. In summary: We are becoming infobese, just as many of us are obese-obese. We’re spending on average 1/6th of our time online. We’re not trusting half of what we hear or read. We’re experiencing record levels of stress.

Anyway, here’s Hack #1 for overcoming Infobesity and it’s simple:

AVOID ‘REPLY ALL’ on EMAILS

The problem with group chats or reply all in email is that it makes communication far more, not far less complicated. How many times have you picked up a thread half way through? Or got tangled trying to find part of a thread itself? I’m sure that email will stick around, just like business cards have never gone away, and this form of exchanging information between people is vital, but was never designed to be used quite so much.

Email is used by over 3.5 billion people, and is set to rise to over 4.5 billion by the mid -2020s. Research by software consultancy Tech Jury showed that nearly 300 billion emails are sent each year[1] and the average person gets over 120 emails a day. So quite apart from the curation need, we clearly do need to simplify how we respond to emails, and when.

Here are my top six hacks for the Reply-All dilemma:

• Never ‘reply all’ more than once in any email chain and instead pick off people to respond to individually. If it is more than 6 people in the chain anyway you know you’re in trouble!
• Pick a person in ‘reply all’ and make sure you voice or video-call them to check-in with them and see how much clearer and less cluttered it is to get things done face-to-face or voice-to-voice.
• Keep notifications off so that you can keep distractions down.
• Bunch the times you do email and keep them totally separate from other things, otherwise you will find yourself lost in a complicated blizzard of being online, offline, doing work, doing social, and it will muddle and distract you.
• Have an Out of Office on which tells people not whether you are in or out of the office, but when you are looking at emails and when you are not.
• Never send an email to someone out of regular hours unless they know whether you mean then to respond: It is basic email etiquette, especially to people more junior than you. Create or communicate your email-hours policy.

[1] https://techjury.net/stats-about/how-many-emails-are-sent-per-day/

Have yourself a very socially healthy Christmas (or why you should get face-to-face and off Facebook for Advent month)

Do not worry about overdoing the mince pies. Chances are you are doing something very healthy this month-long celebration of Christmas, a “festive Season” in which most of us get to come off social media more than usual and are forced to be actually social. Call it face-to-face in a Facebook Age. 

In April my new book about what I call Social Health will be published. Fully Connected: Surviving & Thriving in the Age of Overload looks at the whole business of connection and its discontents in modern society. In organisations, in culture, in everyday life.

Fully Connected takes as a starting point the idea that people, be they wearing professional, personal (or indeed party) hats in their lives, have far more coping strategies and tactics around physical and mental health than around anything to do with their connected health. We need a system, and that system I’ll be publishing, is Social Health.

But you can steal a march. Start by making an early 2017 New Year’s Resolution to treat your diary as your body and aim to control 80% or more of what goes in it….start to notice over Christmas who you see because you love them, or who you reconnect with because you like them, or who you meet who tells you something interesting and who you feel you trust. Start to think about what you do and don’t read, watch, hear, because you are overloaded. Start to think about ways you can bring some order to your department or organisation just like you do with any other kind of New Year’s Resolution.
And start, whatever you do, to get off Facebook, or ay social media you overly rely on as your main way of connecting to other people with for a bit. Never mind the echo chamber, the reinforcing of stereotypical ideas, the algorithm-chosen messages and advertisements. There is no substitute – and I mean no substitute, even if Skype is an adequate proxy when needs must – for face-to-face contact.

Using your 5 senses to smell, see, touch, taste, hear in the company of another person, other people, to experience them fully and not in 140 characters or in carefully edited picture postings, or any other kind of ‘sharing’. That is one aspect of Social Health.

Hexagon Thinking….coming soon in my book Fully Connected

This Christmas, this party season, whoever you hang out with, be yourself with them, not an off duty avatar. Bring yourself to the party and don’t overshare the pictures afterwards. In other words, be Fully Connected.

In the new year you can see where I will be speaking about the book on @juliaconnects on Twiter.

How to Survive the Age of Overload

Good Health is good for you, we all know that. A quick high intensity exercise burst at the gym, or a run, or a good night’s sleep – these all do ourselves ‘ the power of good’. Up until the middle of the last century having good health really meant staying alive, and not dying young: the “Spanish Flu” pandemic 1918-19 which killed many more millions than the First World War itself showed how a common bug which has low mortality can rocket around a population weakened by poor nutrition, bad sanitation, the spreading effect of mass mobility and a factor like war. 

But in 1945 after the Second World War something changed. The UN was created and with it a new body, The World Health Organisation. They wanted to create a world which was healthy enough not just to survive life but to thrive in it. The original definition is interesting, not least because it still stands today:
“a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of injury and disease”.

One word stands out for me: the word “social”. We have come a long way to understanding and practicing good physical and mental health and well-being, but social well-being? Today we have not just a physical obesity crisis – 20% of the world is on course to  be clinically obese by 2025 – but we have a different kind of crisis and deprivation: Information obesity, time poverty and network blockage. 

We are officially in the Age of Overload. Those in control of their schedules and diaries are regarded as infinitely richer than those who are not. Networks are for many people an overwhelming tangle comprising work-related and purely personal databases, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp in a permanent cacophony of addictive sharing rather than a set of trusted relationships who can guide us through the thickets. The MIT psychology Professor Sherry Turkle has written about how conversation is being sidelined by a new condition: “phubbing: the art of talking to other people but with your eyes on your phone”.
The modern fitness revolution was kick- started by the actress Jane Fonda in 1982 with her famous workout video. Something interesting happened the same year: TIME magazine named ‘The Computer’ as its celebrated ‘Person of the Year’. This year, next year, we need a new kind of fitness, one which has been made necessary by the very computerised technology which keeps us all connected – fully connected – all of the time.

We need to know how to switch off, how to manage information overload better, how to connect better face-to-face in a Facebook world, and how to build networks which are not a tangle of virtual tubes but real relationships. We can start with learning how to treat our diaries like our bodies – only putting something in which we feel is good and healthy for us.
Here, then, is my definition of a new kind of health: Social Health: “To maintain a balance of activity, mindset and connections which enhance well-being and productivity”. 

I’m writing what I hope will be the blueprint for Social Health in the home, the office, the corridors of policymaking. Our behaviours have changed substantially around physical and mental health. The next big push needs to be Social Health. 

“Fully Connected: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Overload” will be published by Bloomsbury early 2017.