A short talk by Nathan Zeldes at the Overloaded 2014 conference, discussing the connection between email overload and the overall task burden facing senior managers. For more on this subject, see http://bit.ly/1vimSvN .

1. Lightning Talk:
Is IO a matter of staffing?
Nathan Zeldes
Feb. 25, 2012

2. An interesting insight
• “The problem is not the 200 useless emails; those I can clear
in 30 minutes
• “The problem is that once I’ve done that, there remain forty
serious emails that each require me to make a decision; and
I simply can’t make 40 quality decisions in a single day”
- Senior manager at a Fortune 500 company
Nathan Zeldes 2
http://www.nathanzeldes.com

3. Nathan Zeldes 3
http://www.nathanzeldes.com
The question
• Is the real issue* not the total amount of incoming messages,
as we often assume, but the fact that our managers are
expected to do more managing than they possibly can?
In other words:
• Did the organizational trends of the last 20 years result in a
misalignment between the work at hand and the human
resources we assign to it? Is Email overload just a symptom of
an erosion in staffing?
* - At any rate, for senior managers

4. What this could mean
To cope with the 40 decisions a day, does our manager need:
• An(other) administrative assistant?
• A “Two in a box” co-manager?
• More subordinates?
• Less scope of responsibility?
• All of the above?
Nathan Zeldes 4
http://www.nathanzeldes.com

5. Or is it None of the Above?
We can’t ignore the possibility that:
• More people might merely create more email
(An extension of Parkinson’s law)
• There may be better payoff in making the decision
processes leaner (less approvals, more delegation of
authority) so we go from 40 to 10 decisions a day
Nathan Zeldes 5
http://www.nathanzeldes.com

6. What we do know for sure
• The current situation in many organizations is intolerable, and
is particularly expensive where senior managers are driven
into inability to cope
• Something had better be done about it
Any idea what that would be?
Nathan Zeldes 6
http://www.nathanzeldes.com

7. Thank you
Nathan Zeldes http://www.nathanzeldes.com 7