Category: work/life

According to the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday One in three workers suffers from ’email stress’.

Having just returned to 150 ‘proper’ emails (i.e. not spam or quickly deleted cc’d messages) after a few days out of the office I can empathise.

The researchers conclusions are backed up by my anecdotal evidence of  most of my fellow commuters and numerous overheard conversations on trains and buses.

The general consensus is that this is an inevitable downside of using email to communicate at work.

However not all would agree and Timothy Ferriss, for one, outlines a revolutionary solution to this modern day curse.  In typical American bravado his manifesto on the ChangeThis website is titled, The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload & Triple Productivity in 24 Hours.

However for anyone brave enough to follow it through (and I have to confess I am not yet) I think it could be an effective answer.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) was the closing keynote speaker at the recent SLA Annual Conference in Denver. As well as being a very entertaining speaker he came up with an intriguing test for us as discerning employees.

When you have your tour of the premises of your potential new work home, take a note of the number of Dilbert cartoons you see posted up in the office. If there are none to be seen, then steer well clear, as it is the kind of regime which brutally crushes all attempts at office humour.

If there are lots on show then you still need to be concerned that the staff need to communicate to their bosses in this (un)subtle way.

The best place to work is where you find a light smattering of Dilberts, indicating a sense of both fun and a reasonably high esprit de corps.

How does yours fare?

I am catching up (on my iPod) on the current series of In Business the wonderful BBC Radio 4 half hour show presented Peter Day.

The show was called Computers are taking on show business, and was about how Platinum Blue are using combination of databases of previous hits and an analysis of their musical components to predict future hits for record companies.

What annoys me is that these approaches seem to assume we all have narrowly defined musical tastes and forget there is such a thing as music for a particular mood.

My iPod collection ranges from obvious tracks from the likes of the Beatles on to Leonard Cohen and Regina Spektor, but also includes Queens of the Stone Age and System of a Down. So how is a computer going to successfully predict what I am going to like next.