Category: culture

I recently learned about a new service called Bookshout, a company that provides audiobook codes to corporations so, in turn, they can distribute “books” to clients, prospective clients or employees. It creates a simple method of distribution, either allowing the recipient to choose which book they read or making it easy to get a required reading into the hands of everyone throughout the company. They claim that through Bookshout, people have read 8,400,820,497 words!

And they would know. Beyond promoting its distribution system, Bookshout also brags about its ability to track the use of the e-reader codes. For individuals, it allows people to set reading goals and track their progress against friends (or strangers) – in short, adding gamification to the leisure reading process. You can see how you rank in total words read vs. others in your social circle if you care to know that information.

For companies, Bookshout will “gather critical data to verify who is actually reading” – sharing with the company the code user’s reading habits and total words read. They promote it as “audio with accountability.” So much for skimming the summary before your corporate retreat!

For some individuals, the tracking feature may be appealing, but in the company realm, it feels too intrusive for me. What kind of a culture does the corporation have if they have to monitor reading habits? And if you don’t trust your employees to read a book, how do you trust them with your product or service? Any goodwill that could be garnered by providing professional development or a common reading experience seems to be lost in the data collection.

Technology allows us to easily capture and report an increased level of detail and data. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In my mind, that goes for Bookshout, too.

I think time management is harder these days because people have so many different sources of input. It used to be that everything came to us via the mail or by phone, but now we have content coming from multiple social media platforms, voice mail, messaging, texts, email, shared sites like Slack, etc. It is hard to keep track of it all.

I know there are apps out there like Evernote that serve as a collection point for the barrage, but there is still not a way to synthesize electronic and paper. I need a system for quickly finding what I read in a magazine that relates to something I saw on LinkedIn and ties in with a photo I took. I find myself with imperfect methods to do so, and, as a result, spend more time that I would like to retrieve all the inputs I am trying to integrate.

As a time management technique, it is hard to beat the trusty manila file folder that can instantly group together disparate sources of input and the invaluable spiral notebook that can serve as a repository for all the ideas swirling in my brain, but even these are lacking in their ability to be searched or easily shared. So we all move forward with methods that work for us, compensating for the deficiencies by what we gain in familiarity and the efficiencies that come from repeated use.

I think the lesson to be learned is to minimize the clutter of inputs in the first place. If you routinely don’t apply or share information from a magazine, perhaps you should consider canceling the subscription. If your social media feeds are filled with posts from people with whom you have no other contact, maybe a culling of your groups is in order. If you receive regular email feeds that you routinely delete, it may be worth the time to unsubscribe.

Even with all the productivity apps that are available and the advances in communication and technology, we still need to rely on our brain to connect the dots and make meaning of what comes in. Be wise about what (and how much) input that is.