Daily Archive: April 24, 2005
As more and more people recommend Firefox I have felt increasingly that I am a stuck in the past by continuing to use Maxthon, which use to be MyIE2.
However Maxthon is not a browser to give up lightly. It’s had the greatest affect so far on my productivity, especially when doing blog initiated research. When I go back to using IE, the experience is literally painful (so much mouse movement affects my arthritic hands and wrists). The following Maxthon features make all the difference for me:
- Tabbed browsing
- Double click tab closing
- The ability to open a new tabs with a scroll button click on a hyperlink, left mouse clicking re-uses the current tab
- The ability to make new tabs open in the background so as not to disrupt the current activity
- The ability to change these behaviours as required with a single click on the toolbar
- The ability to create groups of URLs
- The ability to open a group of tabs as a set
- The ability to customise the names of the tabs in a group
- The ability to save a whole load of tabs as a temporary group and re-open later, great when you have an …
Of course some people do get a lot of email and need to read a lot of blogs, but it’s also a great place to hide away from doing what you really need to be doing. I have noticed the following types of avoidance behaviour (the example below are not always avoidance behaviour of course):
- Taking lots of notes (hiding away from the purpose of the meeting)
- Making very long lists of “things to do” and fine tuning the list and the priorities of the tasks on the list (hiding away from doing the tasks on the list)
- Reading hundreds of blog posts (making yourself feel very busy)
- Languishing in hundreds of emails (when you should be asking yourself – what are you doing wrong, not delegating, not journalling, not managing expectations, not creating process etc)
- Making lots of blog posts (when you should be working)
So how do I score on this list:
- Note taking, pretty good, I have always believed it is better to focus on the meeting rather than my notes and been lucky enough to have a memory that’s good enough to remember stuff that’s important. Of course it doesn’t always work and I have tried several times to …
I am being overloaded by information on “information overload”, just today one of my friends posted on the topic – always an event. Then I came across a few posts in my regular feeds. So I started following the trail. Why – because I am easily interested mainly – but also because I am interested in the effect of information overload on collaboration (which I am currently researching) My logic goes something like this:
- When people are co-located, the barrier to collaborate is very low
- For co-located people the range of sensory input is very high, for example overheard conversations, raised voices, moaning in the corridors, teams not talking to each other, people with smiles on their faces, people working late, looking worried etc
- So as people move out of line of sight the barrier to collaborate increases rapidly with distance and the subconscious inputs decrease rapidly.
- To compensate we now need to seek out information from people, this means generally that we need to:
- pro-actively go looking for information
- try and figure out from emails what people actually mean
- try and determine if – when we cold call people and ask them what’s going on whether – they are tired, busy, …
