Her doctors were desperate to find a treatment for her, but nothing worked. This young woman was going to die. One of her doctors remembered talking to a colleague about an experimental treatment that was largely unsuccessful, but it was worth a try. The doctors managed to secure a small sample from a lab at Merck—half of what existed in the United States at the time. They tried it. This woman, Anne Miller, became the first person in the United States to receive this new drug, penicillin. And it saved her life.
When Ray Gilmartin finished this story, the audience was completely quiet. We were all picturing in our mind’s eye this young woman and the tragic fact that she was going to die. We were picturing our own families and we could feel pain for her family. We were relieved when we were told that she survived and that this new drug had saved her life. This tiny little story had a huge impact. It brought home to us what companies like Merck do. They develop drugs that save people, and all of the statistics in the world about lives saved are not as meaningful as that short story about one person. The story brought each of us into the problem. It created a context to which we could relate. It created an emotional response from us. We could feel it. And it was a great illustration of the difference between stories and bits and bullets.
Our leaders want us to know certain things. They want us to know how to serve customers. They want us to know the mission of the company and how it makes money. They want us to know how to treat each other. In the story above, Ray Gilmartin wanted us to know what Merck cares about and the company’s commitment to taking care of people.
In the first part of this Merck story, we are awash in bits and bullets. At some point in presentations like these (usually in the first five minutes), we are lost in the minutiae, drowning in data. That’s when we all begin to daydream about lunch or that last vacation we took.
But here, Ray Gilmartin snapped us back from oblivion with a great story. One of the things we will see in the coming pages is that it’s the lessons contained in the story that we remember, not the bits and bullets.
“Like desperate Gullivers, we’re pinned down by too much information and too much stuff. By one estimate, the world produced five exabytes (or quintillion bytes) of content in 2002—the same amount churned out between 25,000 BC and AD 2000. Little wonder that Real Simple has been the most successful magazine launch in a decade, and the blogosphere is abuzz over the season’s hottest tech innovation: the Hipster PDA (15 index cards held together by a binder clip).”
– LINDA TISCHLER2
DEFINITION: Bits and bullets, noun: 1. Facts and data, parsed into short abbreviations or phrases. 2. Facts and data devoid of all contexts. 3. Short bursts of information that can be very useful but also frequently make you say “huh?” or “what the…?” Usually accompanied by an itty-bitty dot, such as:
• This is the bullet of a bit.
WE ARE ALL FIGHTER PILOTS
The person in Figure 1.1 is you! And me. All of us. This is the way we live now. And it’s nothing short of revolutionary how much rich information and entertainment is at our fingertips. If information were food, we would be constantly surrounded by the most outrageous perpetual feast ever created.
Several recent surveys have looked at how people in organizations are dealing with this information flow. One survey found that “the average user spent 3 hours and 14 minutes using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour workday.”3 Here’s how the average user spent that three-plus hours:
• E-mail—45% of information processing (IP) time
• Telephone calls, conference calls, and voicemail—24% of IP time
• Shared network usage—18% of IP time
• Portal Web site—8% of IP time
• Instant messaging/text messaging—5% of IP time4
FIGURE 1.1 Where You Get Information
The survey results also suggest that less than 50 percent of respondents feel that they are in control of how they manage all of this information. The most surprising finding, though, is that most survey respondents have simply not thought about this issue very much, and thus are not conscious of strategies for managing their personal information.5 The scary thing is that you are probably looking at these numbers above and thinking, “I wish that were me! That ‘average user’ has it easy!”
“I bought a cell phone in 2005. I finally caved. I just didn’t want to be known as ‘that guy without the cell phone.’”
– TAYLOR HESS6
Another interesting aspect of this research is that it doesn’t look at other forms of technology that we are increasingly using, such as digital music players, digital video recorders, satellite radio, and the Internet. When lumped together with the usual suspects—e-mail, voicemail, and cell phones—it becomes clear that information (and entertainment) is finding and filling every remaining minute of time in our lives.
Surveys like the ones noted above suggest that the pendulum is just starting to swing from unmitigated fascination with technology-enabled access to information to the necessity of having strategies for managing information overload and its negative impact on our productivity.
Another sign that the pendulum may be starting to swing back toward the center is the nascent field of interruption science. This branch of study is gaining a lot of attention because it seeks to understand when it’s best and most efficient to interrupt a person at work.
Doesn’t this strike you as odd? We have so much technology that interrupts us that we are now studying how to use technology to improve the productivity of interruptions! It seems that we have come to the realization that the constant stream of information, along with its inevitable interruptions, needs to be managed proactively just so we can get something done!
Computers, of course, are both the hero and the villain. As Clive Thompson put it, in an article about interruption science in the New York Times Magazine, personal computers began life as “little more than glorified word-processors and calculators,”8 but then things began to change. Thompson continues:
“The information glut is hardly the apocalypse that some imagined might come about at the millennium. The world’s not ending, it’s just becoming incomprehensible.”
– JOEL ACHENBACH7
“‘Multitasking’ was born; instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user could work on several different ones simultaneously. Corporations seized on this as a way to squeeze more productivity out of each worker, and technology companies like Microsoft obliged them by transforming the computer into a hub for every conceivable task, and laying on the available information with a trowel. The Internet accelerated this trend even further, since it turned the computer from a sealed box into our primary tool for communication (emphasis added). As a result, office denizens now stare at computer screens of mind-boggling complexity, as they juggle messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and Web browsers all at once. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots.”9
“To perform
