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Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Recovering from information overload | McKinsey & Company - 0 views

  • Drucker’s solutions for fragmented executives—reserve large blocks of time on your calendar, don’t answer the phone, and return calls in short bursts once or twice a day—sound remarkably like the ones offered up by today’s time- and information-management experts.2
  • Add to these challenges a torrent of e-mail, huge volumes of other information, and an expanding variety of means—from the ever-present telephone to blogs, tweets, and social networks—through which executives can connect with their organizations and customers, and you have a recipe for exhaustion. Many senior executives literally have two overlapping workdays: the one that is formally programmed in their diaries and the one “before, after, and in-between,” when they disjointedly attempt to grab spare moments with their laptops or smart phones, multitasking in a vain effort to keep pace with the information flowing toward them.
  • First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism.
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  • econd, addressing information overload requires enormous self-discipline.
  • Third, since senior executives’ behavior sets the tone for the organization, they have a duty to set a better example.
  • Resetting the culture to healthier norms is a critical new responsibility for 21st-century executives.
  • What’s more, multitasking—interrupting one task with another—can sometimes be fun. Each vibration of our favorite high-tech e-mail device carries the promise of potential rewards. Checking it may provide a welcome distraction from more difficult and challenging tasks. It helps us feel, at least briefly, that we’ve accomplished something—even if only pruning our e-mail in-boxes. Unfortunately, current research indicates the opposite: multitasking unequivocally damages productivity.
  • he root of the problem is that our brain is best designed to focus on one task at a time
  • When we switch tasks, our brains must choose to do so, turn off the cognitive rules for the old task, and turn on the rules for the new one.
  • arely helps us solve the toughest problems we’re working on. More often than not, it’s procrastination in disguise.
  • the likelihood of creative thinking is higher when people focus on one activity for a significant part of the day and collaborate with just one other person.
  • survey of managers conducted by Reuters revealed that two-thirds of respondents believed that information overload had lessened job satisfaction and damaged their personal relationships. One-third even thought it had damaged their health.8
  • feeling connected provides something like a “dopamine squirt”—the neural effects follow the same pathways used by addictive drugs.9
  • some combination of focusing, filtering, and forgetting.
  • Managing it may be as simple—and difficult—as switching off the input.
  • A good filtering strategy, therefore, is critical. It starts with giving up the fiction that leaders need to be on top of everything, which has taken hold as information of all types has become more readily and continuously accessible.
  • ome leaders now explicitly refuse to respond to any e-mail on which they are only cc’d, to filter out issues that others think require no action from them. Y
  • giving our brains downtime to process new intellectual input is a critical element of learning and thinking creatively
  • Getting outside helps—recent research has found that people learn significantly better after a walk in nature compared with a walk in the city.
  • The strategies of focusing, filtering, and forgetting are also tougher to implement now because of the norms that have developed around 21st-century teamwork.
  • But there is a business responsibility to reset these norms, given how markedly information overload decreases the quality of learning and decision making. Multitasking is not heroic; it’s counterproductive. As the technological capacity for the transmission and storage of information continues to expand and quicken, the cognitive pressures on us will only increase. We are at risk of moving toward an ever less thoughtful and creative professional reality unless we stop now to redesign our working norms.
  • First, we need to acknowledge and reevaluate the mind-sets that attach us to our current patterns of behavior.
  • eaders need to become more ruthless than ever about stepping back from all but the areas that they alone must address.
  • eaders have to redesign working norms together with their teams.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

A Software Toolkit for Your Information Diet | Clay Johnson | Big Think - 0 views

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    Video by Clay Johnson on import of health information diet, big think website. April 24, 2013. Rescuetime.com--measures your intake of info on computer--makes you a more conscious consumer, how much time spending on email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Loves samebox.com--for pay subscription service--advanced spam filter, only puts important messages before you, emails you a digest at the end of every day of everything else Trying to live an ad free lifestyle--just as expensive as paying for content. ex--Domino's pizza commercial convinces you to buy pizza instead of making dinner. Use ad block on firefox and chrome to reduce exposure to ads. Cut cable to stop exposure to TV advertisements--"makes for weird bar conversations sometimes"
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Tweetdig - Twitter Organizer - 0 views

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    An app for prioritizing, categorizing, and filtering tweets
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

SXSW Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Informa... - 1 views

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    great slideshare on hacking your RSS feeds to get only the most timely and relevant posts by Dawn Foster at Puppet Labs
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Manage Digital Information Overload Using These 3 Steps - The Crossroads of Technology ... - 0 views

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    Great blog post on Bizzuka on how to manage digital information overload using three steps, 9/9/2013. 1. collect information 2. filter information 3. organize information
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Mindful Infotention: Dashboards, Radars, Filters - City Brights: Howard Rheingold - 0 views

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    Blog post by Howard Rheingold on September 1, 2009. "Knowing what to pay attention to is a cognitive skill that steers and focuses the technical knowledge of how to find information worth your attention. More and more, knowing where to direct your attention involves a third element, together with your own attentional discipline and use of online power tools - other people. Increasingly, most of the recommendations that make it possible to find fresh and useful signals amid the overwhelming noise of the Internet are social media - online networks that make possible social exchange and relationship. Tuning and feeding our personal learning networks is where the internal and the technological meet the social. "
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Why Technology Is So Addictive, and How You Can Avoid Tech Burnout - 0 views

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    Blog by Adam Dachis on Lifehacker on living with technology, 8.31.10. Outlines the problem and provides answers. We're surrounded by gadgets that demand our attention, constantly fragmenting our ability to properly focus on the task at hand. Living with technology doesn't mean we have to live with an addiction, however. Here's how to beat tech burnout. Back when we were tethered to desktop computers, this wasn't such a problem. First of all, technology had yet to proliferate in society at the enormous level it has nowadays, but more importantly we didn't have little computers (read: smartphones) that we could stick in our pockets. Previously we might check out email at a few convenient intervals during the day. Now these tiny little multitaskers are requesting our attention wherever we go. We have many more opportunities to interact with information and so we run into two more dilemmas: filtering an information overload and using our technology appropriately. The Solutions So what do we do about it? Overcoming a tech addiction and avoiding burnout requires work. There aren't any magic tricks that'll pave the road to freedom, but here are some ideas to get you started. Out of Sight, Out of Mind Stop Multitasking Never Apologize Get Organized
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Howard Rheingold's World of Infotention | Powerful Learning Practice - 0 views

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    Blog post by Ann Michaelsen, January 27, 2012 "Have you ever sat down in front of your computer, expecting a lot of work to be done in a certain amount of time, only to find that you have done nothing work-related at all? Or that you've done a lot - just not what you planned to do? Many people are thinking about the way we spend our time and what gets our attention in this digital age. Howard Rheingold calls it infotention and I've been learning a lot about it recently thanks to his challenging but rewarding online course, "Introduction to Mind Amplifiers." It's a five-week experience using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter. Participation requires a serious commitment of time and attention by every member of the learning group. Believe me, the skill of staying focused on what is important certainly proves to be helpful here! The world demands "infotention" Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. ~ Howard Rheingold"
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Manager and machine: The new leadership equation | McKinsey & Company - 0 views

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    article by Martin Dewhurst and Paul Willmott, September 2014 on new leadership skills required in age of new information technologies Machines force executives and senior leaders to: 1. open up their companies through crowdsourcing and social platforms within and across organizational boundaries 2. create data sets worthy of the most intelligent machines 3. "let go" in ways that run counter to a century of OD 4. executives...able to make the biggest difference through the human touch. ...questions they frame, their vigor in attaching exceptional circumstances highlighted by increasingly intelligent algorithms ... tolerating ambiguity and focusing on the "softer" side of management to engage the organization and build its capacity for self-renewal. 5. turbocharged data-analytics strategy, a new top-team mind-set, fresh talent approaches, and a concerted effort to break down information silos...transcend number crunching..."weak signals" from social media and other sources also contain powerful insights and should be part of the data-creation process. 6. ...early movers will probably gain insights of unstructured data, such as email discussions between representatives or discussion threads in social media. 7. ...dashboards don't create themselves. Senior executives must find and set the software parameters needed to determine, for instance, which data gets prioritized and which gets flagged for escalation. 8. ...odds of sinking under the weight of even quite valuable insights grow as well. Answer: democratizing it: encouraging and expecting the organization to manage itself without bringing decisions upward. ...business units and functions will be able to make more and better decisions on their own. 9. 8 will happen even as the CEO begins to morph into a "chief experimentation officer," who draws from acute observance of early signals to bolster a company's ability to experiment at scale. 10. need to "let go" will be more significant and the discomfort of s
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Infotention Part Three: Building Information Dash... - 0 views

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    Need to return to this instructional screencast on mindful infotention by Howard Rheingold, 2/6/2010
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Shut Up and Sit Down - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • People who fetishize leadership sometimes find themselves longing for crisis.
  • Our faith in the value of leadership is durable—it survives, again and again, our disappointment with actual leaders.
  • f you’re flexible in how you translate the word “leadership,” you’ll find that people have been thinking about it for a very long time.
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  • Rost found that writers on leadership had defined it in more than two hundred ways. Often, they glided between incompatible definitions within the same book: they argued that leaders should be simultaneously decisive and flexible, or visionary and open-minded. The closest they came to a consensus definition of leadership was the idea that it was “good management.” In practice, Rost wrote, “leadership is a word that has come to mean all things to all people.”
  • “The End of Leadership,” from 2012, Barbara Kellerman, a founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, wrote that “we don’t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago.” She points out that, historically, the “trajectory” of leadership has been “about the devolution of power,” from the king to the voters, say, or the boss to the shareholders. In recent years, technological and economic changes like social media and globalization have made leaders less powerful.
  • Max Weber distinguished between the “charismatic” leadership of traditional societies and the “bureaucratic” leadership on offer in the industrialized world.
  • Khurana found that many companies passed over good internal candidates for C.E.O. in favor of “messiah” figures with exceptional charisma.
  • Charismatic C.E.O.s are often famous, and they make good copy;
  • y the mid-twentieth century
  • “process-based” approach. T
  • if you read a detailed, process-oriented account of Jobs’s career (“Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is particularly good), it’s clear that Jobs was a master of the leadership process. Time and time again, he gathered intelligence about the future of technology; surveyed the competition and refined his taste; set goals and assembled teams; tracked projects, intervening into even apparently trivial decisions; and followed through, considering the minute details of marketing and retail. Although Jobs had considerable charisma, his real edge was his thoughtful involvement in every step of an unusually expansive leadership process.
  • some organizations the candidate pool is heavily filtered: in the military, for example, everyone who aspires to command must jump through the same set of hoops. In Congress, though, you can vault in as a businessperson, or a veteran, or the scion of a political family.
  • whether times are bad enough to justify gambling on a dark-horse candidate.
  • Leadership BS
  • five virtues that are almost universally praised by popular leadership writers—modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness,
  • and selflessness—and argues that most real-world leaders ignore these virtues. (If anything, they tend to be narcissistic, back-stabbing, self-promoting shape-shifters.) To Pfeffer, the leadership industry is Orwellian.
  • Reading Samet’s anthology, one sees how starkly perspectival leadership is. From the inside, it often feels like a poorly improvised performance; leading is like starring in a lip-synched music video. The trick is to make it look convincing from the outside. And so the anthology takes pains to show how leaders react to the ambiguities of their roles. In one excerpt, from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Samet finds him marching toward an enemy camp. Grant, a newly minted colonel who has never commanded in combat, is terrified: “My heart kept getting higher and higher, until it felt to me as though it was in my throat.” When the camp comes into view, however, it’s deserted—the other commander, Grant surmises, “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.” Leaders, he realizes, are imagined to be fearless but aren’t; ideally, one might hide one’s fear while finding in it clues about what the enemy will do.
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    article by Joshua Rothman on leadership and how our views of leadership have changed through the centuries and how leadership virtues don't always agree with the actions taken by "leaders" whom we admire. 
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Iconizer.net | board free icons - 1 views

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    Iconizer.net page has great tools for working with their images.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Silicon Valley's Youth Problem - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!
  • The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.
  • I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.
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  • Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.)
  • “But now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.” This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures.
  • Despite its breathtaking arrogance, the question resonates; it articulates concerns about tech being, if not ageist, then at least increasingly youth-fetishizing. “People have always recruited on the basis of ‘Not your dad’s company,’ ” Biswas said.
  • On a certain level, the old-guard-new-guard divide is both natural and inevitable. Young people like to be among young people; they like to work on products (consumer brands) that their friends use and in environments where they feel acutely the side effects of growth. Lisa and Jim’s responses to the question “Would you work for an old-guard company?” are studiously diplomatic — “Absolutely,” they say — but the fact remains that they chose, from a buffet of job options, fledgling companies in San Francisco.
  • Cool exists at the ineffable confluence of smart people, big money and compelling product.
  • Older engineers form a smaller percentage of employees at top new-guard companies, not because they don’t have the skills, but because they simply don’t want to. “Let’s face it,” Karl said, “for a 50-something to show up at a start-up where the average age is 29, there is a basic cultural disconnect that’s going on. I know people, mostly those who have stayed on the technical side, who’ve popped back into an 11-person company. But there’s a hesitation there.”
  • Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code. Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks,
  • “People want the enterprise tools they use at work to look and feel like the web apps they use at home.”
  • Some of us will continue to make the web products that have generated such vast wealth and changed the way we think, interact, protest. But hopefully, others among us will go to work on tech’s infrastructure, bringing the spirit of the new guard into the old.
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    Interesting article on the age divide between new guard (Stripe) and old guard companies (Cisco) and why that is so, Yiren Lu, March 12, 2014
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: The Big Shift in Business Strategy - 0 views

  • The key is to develop the capacity to move rapidly to reap the most benefit from influence, leverage and learning. Firms and other institutions need to cultivate the ability to participate in an expanding range of knowledge flows effectively. 
  • They must also find ways to effectively filter through this expanding range of knowledge flows to extract the insights and approaches that have the potential to create the most value. Finally, they also need to quickly turn around and apply these insights and approaches both within their organization and across a broader range of participants in the system. In sum, the winners will be those who master the techniques required for scalable learning.
  • These are proactive strategies of movement – designed to strengthen influence points by harnessing their learning potential. If done right, it creates a powerful virtuous cycle – more effective learning attracts others and expands influence which in turn increases the potential for further learning.  To borrow a favorite phrase from my colleague, John Seely Brown, we trigger a generative dance between position and movement that takes us to unforeseen levels of impact.
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  • Here are some key questions you should be asking and answering:   Who occupies influence points today within my market or industry? What are potential new influence points that might emerge from the fundamental forces reshaping my market or industry? Who is working to build and occupy new influence points? Have I built robust relationships with these players?
  • One final thought – what if we applied this strategic notion of influence points and accelerated learning to our individual lives? How could we increase our personal impact?
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    John Hagel is a co-chair of Deloitte Center for the Edge. Here he talks about influence points and positioning oneself among influence points through our technology enabled connections. Power laws still concentrate an extraordinary # of connections around a few nodes. But having access to knowledge flows, one will be able to anticipate what's going to happen before others do, one could perhaps shape the flows and more rapid learning may occur because of access to a growing and diverse set of information or knowledge flows. Learning faster than anyone else will enable a company or person to "have a significant advantage relative to those who are scrambling to catch up." Uses the PC microprocessor and operating system components to concretize influence points.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

6 Things The Most Organized People Do Every Day - 0 views

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    Great blog post by Eric Barker on getting organized, August 24, 2014.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

7 Important Reasons to Unplug and Find Space - 0 views

  • 1. Powering-down helps remove unhealthy feelings of jealousy, envy, and loneliness.
  • 3. Solitude is harder to find in an always-connected world.
  • 4. Life, at its best, is happening right in front of you.
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  • But no matter how much I interact with others through the miracle of technology, there is something entirely unique and fantastic about meeting face-to-face. The experience of looking another person in the eye without the filter of a screen changes everything. Each time, I am reminded that life’s most fulfilling relationships are the ones in the world right in front of me. And spending too much time looking away from them does a great disadvantage to my soul and theirs.
  • Take one extended break on a regular basis. I have found great value in choosing 40 days each year to power-down unnecessary apps (leaving only phone and text privileges on my phone). And I have completed the exercise each of the last two years. It has taught me about technology, relationships, and myself. Whether it be for one weekend, one week, or 40 days, there is great value in taking an intentional extended break from technology. Pick something. And get started right away. Your life is waiting.
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    finding space offline
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