Moving at the Speed of Creativity

“The key to getting in a creative state is to avoid interruptions.”

So says John Clese in this wonderful, ten minute video from the recent World Creativity Forum in Belgium.

My own experiences also validate this statement. My wife heard this excerpt of the video tonight as I was playing it on my laptop and asked, “Is that why you stay up so late writing?” My reply: “Yes, exactly.” I crave uninterrupted time to learn and reflect. With a day job, a wonderful wife and three terrific kids, late at night is about the only time I can find which meets this requirement for creativity.

While I agree with John’s observation about creativity and interruptions, I heartily DISAGREE with his assertion that “We know we don’t get them [our creative ideas] from our laptops.” I am positive a great deal of my ideas which become the raw materials for new sytheses (at times creative thoughts) are brought to me precisely by my laptop. I do agree with John’s point that our unconscious mind brings us creative ideas, but I will assert that the raw materials with which our minds (both conscious and unconscious) forge new neural connections certainly CAN come from digital communications, on laptops.

I also agree with John’s observation that we can’t be creative people by simply “keeping all the balls in the air” during the day and checking off items on our “to-do” lists. While busyness does not lead to creativity, I do think there is merit to the GTD idea that being able to securely “deposit” all our to-do’s into a trusted system (mine is Toodledo) can free our minds to be more creative.

John argues that we have to create an oasis amidst the busyness of our lives which includes boundaries of SPACE and TIME in order to be creative. Boundaries are very important. As I’ve noted previously, defined boundaries allow us to have “margin” in our lives which is critical for not only mental health but also “success” in economic as well as relational contexts.

Turning a cell phone off or putting it in “airplane mode” is critical in creating real boundaries of space and time for creative thought, as John discusses in this video. He doesn’t make this point, but it is an idea which immediately came to my mind as I listened to him.

This final quotation from John struck a major chord with me. I won’t relate why at this point, but it certainly does.

If the people in charge are very egotistical, then they want to take credit for everything that happens, and they want to feel that they are in control of everything that happens, and that means consciously or unconsciously they will discourage creativity in other people.

Some great thoughts to think about. If you say you want to encourage creativity, are you still fretting over who gets the credit for the good work which is done? This is an instructive litmus test for many contexts.

Nod to Ewan McIntosh for sharing this video.

Technorati Tags:
creativity, boundaries, cleese, johncleese, worldcreativityforum, busyness, margin, gtd, toodledo

I’ve been using the website 43actions to keep track of my personal to-do lists for a few weeks now. Today I visited with two friends who are using reQall and Toodledo for their personal to-do lists, and both like the tools a great deal. None of these tools (as far as I know) are configured to be used by groups, however, just individuals. Short of utilizing full-blown project management software, does anyone know of a website offering group “to-do list” functionality? I’m thinking of something which would permit tasks to be defined, assigned to individuals, and tracked per specified deadlines. This sounds like a great application for Google Labs to tackle! Does anyone know of group “to-do list” webapps which are available today? (And preferably free!)

Technorati Tags:
group, productivity, organize, software, todo

As I am sure you have noticed, we’re living in an attention economy where information is exploding. With all the content around us, how do we manage available information streams most effectively and efficiently? This is an essential question for EVERYONE, not just those of us who are admitted “geeks.” Information continues to explode, but we continue to just have 24 hours in each day. I love my iPod and all the great content now available digitally, both from free and commercial sources. Eric Hileman and I taught a group of seniors about iTunes University, among other topics, last week in our “Tech Talk” at a local church, and I think many of them were really amazed by everything that is now available FREE online as audio and video podcasts. When it comes to podcast channels, how can we effectively manage all the GREAT content “out there” and avoid being overwhelmed by it? These are questions with which I continue to struggle. I don’t have all the answers, but I have found some helpful ways to answer at least some of them.

I created a short video podcast / screencast several weeks ago explaining how I use Juice Receiver (free, cross-platform software) in conjunction with PodNova (a free, web-based service for podcast channel subscription management) and iTunes to periodically “clean up” the podcast channels to which I’ve subscribed. (Currently I subscribe to 53 different channels. PodNova provides an OPML link if you want to download these and subscribe to any of them yourself using any OPML compliant podcatching software.) Certainly you can manage all your podcast subscriptions within iTunes, but I have found this mix of software and web-based services to be beneficial for several reasons. (See my post last May, “The joy of Juice Receiver and PodNova” for more background on this.)

During my most recent “podcast channel cleanup,” I was struck by how important podcast episode titles are. As I scan through several hundred podcast episodes, the title of individual podcasts is really all I have to go on to make a split-second decision: Keep or delete?

I love maintaining a rich and diverse array of high quality podcasts on my iPod and iPhone, which I can turn on anytime I’m in the car alone driving somewhere. No, I don’t always listen to podcasts in the car, but I frequently do, and it is wonderful to have such wonderful professional development options literally at my fingertips 24/7.

I took some journalism classes when I was in high school, and I remember a few lessons our teacher presented about the importance of writing good headlines. Headlines generally aspire to “grab” our attention as well as summarize the content of an article. We live in an attention economy, where information is plentiful but time (and our attention) is very limited. It is important for us to help students learn the techniques as well as the importance of “headline writing” not only in formal journalism classes, but also in other content area classes where learners are writing and publishing.

Does that title or headline grab my attention?

Does that title succinctly summarize the content of that podcast episode?

Those are important questions for learners and content publishers in the 21st century information landscape to consider. Shouldn’t that “group” include everyone in your school and mine? I think so.

Technorati Tags:
podcast, itunes, podnova, juice, juicereceiver, title, attention, information, overload, manage, organize, strategy, tutorial, itunesuniversity

It’s been about 3 weeks since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone software roadmap and released the iPhone SDK (software development kit.) Until this evening I had not taken time to explore the available web apps (web applications) for the iPhone. As I’ve watched a set of severe thunderstorms roll into our area (on TV) north of Oklahoma City this evening/morning, I’ve started to explore several web apps and have to say I am VERY impressed. Wow. To think these are just “1st generation” web applications for the iPhone… It’s mind boggling to try and imagine where we are going to be in just five years in terms of mobile applications. These are the applications I explored this evening, with some brief descriptions and comments.

Podcaster: This web app lets users subscribe to podcast feeds and listen to / watch them them DIRECTLY on an iPhone. Normally with podcasts, iPhone users subscribe to them in iTunes and then have to synchronize the iPhone to their computer to get the podcasts transferred over. With Podcaster, that process can be skipped as long as you have an Internet connection. The site does not yet support OPML import, evidently, and it appears all non-approved Feedburner podcast feed addresses may be blocked, but I absolutely LOVE this web app and see huge potential here. I subscribed to the Best of YouTube podcast, Discovery Channel Video Podcasts, National Geographic Video Shorts, NOVA | PBS, NPR Science Friday, NPR Technology, This Week in Tech, and some others. On my home WiFi connection the downloads are VERY speedy. It is AMAZING to be able to access podcast audio and video this way! I’ve spent a bit of time watching YouTube videos on my iPod, but honestly not that much time– I can really see the value of being able to access podcast channel content this way WITHOUT having to sync up with iTunes. This web app is superb.

iSwaggle: One of the current limitations of SMS text messaging on the iPhone’s standard SMS interface is that users can just send text messages to single individuals. iSwaggle addresses this shortcoming, permitting users to create groups with varying privacy and message permission levels so single SMS messages can be sent out to multiple folks included in groups. People have to confirm they want to be in the group in order to receive messages, so that is good from a privacy/SMS spam standpoint. I setup an iSwaggle group for our family to use, mainly for alert messaging, as well as our “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” project.

Kudit: The Kudit web app site includes variety of applications divided into categories including calculators, tools, score keepers, social, games, and toys. Some are offered free, others provide a free trial but require a subsequent purchase which activates the tool for a period of time. (Like 3 months.) Free calculators include Words Per Minute (typing speed on your iPhone) and Resistor value (enter the color sequence of a resistor to look up its value.) Calculators available for purchase include a VERY cool tip calculator (which allows you to rate the service and thereby change the percentage of the tip, and specify how many ways to split the total bill.) A free stopwatch tool is available, but I’m not sure it is any better than the built-in stopwatch on the iPhone which is part of the “Clock” application. My favorite application is probably the scorekeeper for the game “Spades.” Enter bids for each team, and then enter the tricks taken by each team to have your iPhone keep score. The “Give Food” application under the “Social” category links users to the website “Free Rice,” where users can guess the definition of vocabulary words (and see advertisements, which I am guessing funds this initiative) to donate grains of rice (20 grains per word) to “hungry people.” I’d never heard of that site before. Another site available is thehungersite.com. On this site, visitors simply click a link to have site sponsors donate food to the needy. A “Fair Trade” store is available where people can shop and via their purchase donate more money to feed the hungry. I’d be interested to read more about the legitimacy of these websites. If they are legit (and I don’t have a reason to doubt they are beyond my “normal” critical eye) these sites would be worthwhile to introduce to students in school computer labs. Got a few extra minutes at the start or end of class? Guess some vocab words, help donate food for the hungry… No iPhone required.

43 Actions: 43 Actions is “a GTD (Getting Things Done) inspired, mobile to-do list and advanced organizer. Designed specifically to let you manage your daily life on the go, using the always-on internet access in your iPhone.” I have wanted to start using the service Jott.com ever since I heard Liz Kolb describe it in her “Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools” presentation for K-12 Online 2007. Since 43 Actions supports Jott, I think I’m about to become a new Jott user! This is a “donor exclusive” feature for 43 Actions, however, so I have made a donation via PayPal to the 43 Actions development group so I can experiment with this functionality later this week. I went ahead and transferred all my current “to dos” and project categories from TaskPaper to 43 Actions. I have enjoyed using TaskPaper, but the fact that I don’t have those to-dos on my iPhone has been a MAJOR limitation and disadvantage. I’m eager to start using 43 Actions this week and will post later about my experiences. For more on my experiences and perspectives on the “Getting Things Done” organizational system, refer to prior posts in my recently added “organization” blog category.

ADDITION 31 MARCH 2008: I HAVE JUST LEARNED THAT THE HAYS, KANSAS, CONFERENCE ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED FOR APRIL 8TH HAS BEEN POSTPONED TILL THE FALL BECAUSE OF LOW REGISTRATION NUMBERS. ;-(

I’m going to see about sharing an iPhone web app presentation at the upcoming “Mobile Teaching and Learning Conference” at Ft Hays State University (in Hays, Kansas) next week. I am sharing the keynote address at the conference in the afternoon, but will be sharing two breakout sessions as well in the morning. The conference takes place on Tuesday, April 8th.

Well, it has certainly been an exciting evening and morning… and not just thanks to these iPhone web apps. We’ve had tornado sirens go off several times here in Edmond, Oklahoma, and tornados as well as strong straightline winds have caused damage as well as downed power lines just north of us.

Thank goodness for doppler radar and television meteorologists who stay right on top of these storms. Such is life in tornado alley in the spring.

Technorati Tags:
iphone, webapp, web, app, application, gtd, gettingthingsdone, organize, organizer, oklahoma, tornado, radar

This morning, thanks to one of my my daughters being under the weather and needing some home supervision, I’m having a much-needed to chance to catch up on my “piles of stuff.” Currently, I’m in the process of digitizing stacks of notes like these into their appropriate places:

I’m continuing to use the reasonably priced ($18) and simple software program TaskPaper to maintain my digital “to do” lists, organized by project as recommended in David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” I’ve written about my struggles to find better routines for organizing and processing the information of my life in last July’s post “Thoughts on bit literacy and information overload coping strategies,” last September’s post “Seeking the elusive ‘inbox zero,’” October’s post “Inbox Zero: Living the dream!” and a post two weeks ago titled “Managing information streams in the attention economy.” Although I am generally reluctant to add more categories to my Wordpress blog, I went ahead and added the category “organization” today and added these posts to it. I also added last July’s post “Understanding stress,” which includes some early reflections on David Allen’s book and GTD strategy.

I am still a MAJOR “work in progress” when it comes to implementing GTD, but I am glad to have a framework for thinking and behaving in smarter and more effective ways when it comes to organizing and using information in my life. Tim Wilson actually introduced me to GTD at the TCEA conference in Austin back in 2007. I can’t say that GTD has changed my life YET, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to make that claim before too long. (BTW, the following photograph is thankfully NOT a personal one!)

As I continue to struggle with my own routines for managing information and “getting things done” in the different arenas of my life, I am struck by how important it is that students have formal access to email at school and learn strategies for coping with email. It is true that many young people, with access to a cell phone and text messaging plan, prefer using SMS to email. That preference does not change the fact that email has become and remains a very important communication modality in our 21st century infoverse and economy, however. While there are days I’d like to completely abandon email, because it can overwhelm and frustrate me, I realize this is an impossibility given the work before me. There certainly are some jobs today which do not require use of email, and there will continue to be some jobs which fit into that category. I have a limited perspective, but my sense is that the importance and ubiquity of email is only going to grow for most people in the years ahead.

I learned at COSN several weeks ago that ePals now provides FREE, teacher-moderated email accounts for school students. Of course we still have some school district leaders who insist that ALL web-based services and content used by students and teachers in the district must be hosted by the local school district. For those districts ePals SchoolMail may not be an option. For the rest of us, however, I think the free availability of SchoolMail is GREAT news.

As I have noted previously, all information does not HAVE to be “digital” to be relevant to me, but for information to be most useful and accessible to me that I need to “work” I find that digitizing it can help a great deal. I’m thankful to have some hours today to work on digitizing my life and using that information in (hopefully) smarter ways to “get things done.”

Technorati Tags:
gtd, organize, organization, digitize, documents, davidallen

We hear many terms to describe the era in which we live. Alvin Toffler calls it “the third wave,” John Naisbitt and others refer to it as “the information age.” As I detailed in a three part podcast series last fall, I increasingly find the term “attention economy” more descriptive and helpful. Michael Goldhaber first introduced me to the term “attention economy” with his 1997 article “The Attention Economy and the Net.” As Goldhaber points out, economies are always defined by what is SCARCE rather than what is plentiful. As virtually everyone (pun intended) connected to the Internet today can attest from their personal experiences, information is anything BUT scarce today. Information continues to explode at a dizzying rate, and our strategies for effectively managing information flows are more important than ever.For some time now, I have found the RSS feed notification features built into the Safari web browser (available free for both Windows and Macintosh users) to be extremely helpful to me as I manage information each day. By dropping the RSS or ATOM web feed addresses of information streams I want to monitor throughout the day, I am able to view a NUMBER of new items in these feeds directly in my web browser, in the upper left corner:As you can see in the above screenshot, at the time this was taken there were 17 new items in the feeds I am monitoring in this folder: 4 new comments on my primary blog, 1 new Twitter direct message to my userid, two new items I’ve shared via Google Reader, 9 new comments on VoiceThreads I (or my children) have created, and one new comment on my Flickr images. I used Tweetscan to create the RSS feed for my direct Twitter messages, the other feeds are from each respective website. It is wonderful to see so many web 2.0 tools supporting web feeds, including VoiceThread. I use Google Reader to read many of the web-feeds to which I am subscribed each day, but the content there is potentially overwhelming because there is just SO MUCH. Given the challenges inherent in this “attention economy,” I find the ability to use Safari (in the way I’ve described here) to monitor every post in a smaller, discrete number of web feeds to be invaluable.I continue to struggle to stay on top of my professional and personal email, and cannot (sadly) report that I’ve mastered the techniques and habits of “inbox zero.” (I haven’t “lived that dream” since last October.) While I continue to struggle with email, I find my ability to manage multiple information streams via Safari and its support for web feeds to be a wonderful, free tool every day which helps me be more effective and “in the loop / in the know” about data streams I need and want to follow.Is anyone using FireFox, Flock, or another browser in a similar way to receive immediate feedback when new content is posted in certain web feeds?Technorati Tags:information, rss, inboxzero, overwhelm, atom, webfeed, safari, browser, overload, manage

Ah. The simple yet elusive pleasure of “inbox zero.”First time I’ve seen this since September 12th before we left for Learning 2.0! Thanks to both Merlin Mann and David Allen!Technorati Tags:email, merlinmann, inboxzero, inbox, zero, davidallen, gtd

It is quite challenging to return to “normal life” and work after a week-long trip and face email inboxes.Since starting David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” several months ago, I’ve started applying several of his core organizational principles with limited but positive results. Since it is quite hard to change long-established organizational and information-processing habits, I’m not overly frustrated at the slow pace of my success with his “GTD” strategies, but I am optimistic that I’m on a constructive road of more efficient behaviors.I was interested to read about David Allen and his new age roots in the article “The Guru of Getting Things Done” in the October 2007 edition of Wired magazine. (Which incidentally doesn’t appear to be online yet.) The article, in addition to providing surprising background about David’s past life and work, provides a succinct summary of Allen’s GTD philosophy as a single axiom and three basic rules. One of the key elements of GTD in the context of digital information processing is “inbox zero,” or an empty inbox. I continue to work toward this goal in both my personal and professional inboxes. Since getting an iPhone and connecting my personal Yahoo email account to it, keeping my personal inbox empty has become an achievable goal. Staying away (largely) from my email inboxes last week when we were in China led, of course, to a stack-up in emails, but I am hopeful to return to “inbox zero” early this week.Merlin Mann is another vocal advocate of the “inbox zero” philosophy. In July 2007 Merlin shared an hour-long “Google Talk” titled “inbox zero: action-based email” which gave him an opportunity to share his thoughts on this and other subjects related to organization and “getting things done.” Merlin is the founder of the 43 Folders website and this presentation was based on work Merlin has done in the past on this topic for 43 Folders:The slides Merlin used in his presentation are also available on SlideShare. His actual presentation is 32 minutes long, followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A.Like Merlin, my involvement with email started in earnest in the mid-1990s with a PINE email account. In 1988 at the US Air Force Academy, we had an internal email system, and I remember that someone in my 4 degree class got in trouble for accidentally emailing an unprofessional message about our commandant of cadets (a 1 star general) to the entire wing using wildcard characters– but other than that incident my memories of using email in the late 1980s and early 1990s are very limited. Email was sharply limited then in its inter-operaibility with other email systems, so its use was less widespread and it was inherently less powerful as a communication modality. That changed in the mid 1990s, and has certainly continued to morph as we enter the closing months of 2007. I never took a course or even a workshop on email management, yet being able to efficiently manage email has become a critical life skill for me and many others.Merlin contends that “one of the most important soft skills you can have in business today is being able to deal effectively with a high volume of email.” To do this, Merlin contends (as David Allen does) that you must be able to put in place a simple, effective system that allows you to have “a life outside of email.” Merlin suggests that an email system needs to “build walls” so people will NOT “live in their inbox.” Merlin defines knowledge workers as “people who add value to information,” and proclaims the sanctity of “edges” when it comes to dealing with all sorts of information, and in this presentation, email specifically.Merlin points out that there are NO BOUNDARIES inherent in the demands and requests which other people can put on your TIME and ATTENTION. He is absolutely right about this. In my last job at a university, I experienced this dramatically in the five years I worked as a support staff member for both faculty and staff. The lack of natural boundaries in the time and attention DEMANDS which others placed on my plate became, at times, quite overwhelming and almost debilitating. Thankfully, for much of my time at the university, I had excellent folks working with me on my team, and that was a great asset. The dynamics which I experienced are likely similar to those experienced by many others, and this can be a challenging situation to say the least.The key, according to Merlin, is making sure your time and attention are always “mapping” to the things you “claim are important.” Merlin acknowledges that many of his ideas around “inbox zero” come from David Allen and his GTD philosophy, which David calls “advanced common sense.”I heartily agree with Merlin that for those people who think every email needs a response, “that is 1993 talking.” He is SO right about that. Over-responding to email is a common problem, and leads to more problems in the form of more email!Merlin’s five “verbs” which he applies when processing email do sound like advanced common sense.” These are:

1. delete (or archive)
2. delegate
3. respond
4. defer
5. do

The key is getting into the mindset of converting email data into actions. Merlin uses the software OmniFocus to keep “ticklers” of things he has delegated and needs to follow-up on later.Merlin contends “your inbox should be for emails you haven’t read yet.” Simple, straightforward, but probably a concept many of us are not applying.”Liberate activities out of your inbox.” Merlin exhorts his audience to use a software application to serve as a task manager / task list.”If you keep your email box tidy, you will respect it more.” Merlin contends keeping your email box clean is a way of showing your own respect for your time and attention.Merlin summarizes “life hacking” as overriding the things the dumb part of your brain wants to do, and instead doing the things the smart part of your brain tells you to do.The key to all of this is regularly processing email according to a set of sharp edged rules. Merlin suggests turning off your email for periods of time while you go and work on something else. Merlin suggests scheduling “email dashes” when you check email on a periodic basis, maybe 10 minutes every hour. As much as you can, try to “shut off” email and then periodically check in with it.Merlin encourages us to periodically consider, throughout the day, whether or not we are spending our time and attention on things that map to our priorities. If there are ways we can make email “less noisy” and still remain productive, then we should do those things. We need to recognize the negative, disruptive function of email and limit or remove entirely its attention-demanding tyrannical nature from our daily lives. This dovetails nicely with thoughts I’ve written about previously relating to “digital discipline.”The dynamics of “access” to people, their ideas, and their attention have shifted with email, and Merlin addresses this in the Q&A time following his presentation. As he observes, email somehow conveys an idea to people that they have unlimited access to your time and attention. Where people would not likely call you after 9 pm on the phone to ask a question, they have no problem sending you an email about it. These are important issues to consider, and then decide how to “process” and handle with those “sharp edges” Merlin discussed earlier in the presentation.Managing people’s expectations of your response time to email is also important. Merlin relates his own history of learning how “over-delivering” in advance of deadlines can create negative feedback loops. I resonate with this as well. It’s as if being highly responsive and highly skilled creates a negative feedback loop of ever-increasing expectations for ridiculously short time suspense responses that require an enormous quantity and quality of work. That feedback loop is not sustainable for knowledge workers. Here is my attempt at a visual of this dynamic:Having boundaries with sharp edges is an essential skill. Perhaps this has always been true, but the near-ubiquitous access many knowledge workers now enjoy (?) or experience has likely multiplied the importance of this skill in the last ten years. I am writing about these ideas not because I have mastered them or found a “solution” to all these issues, but because I am actively working on them and seeking solutions.I think both David Allen and Merlin Mann have a lot to offer in the elusive quest for “inbox zero” and the larger goal of living a life characterized by peaceful effectiveness, despite the chaotic cauldron of information and attention demands which is constantly storming the gates of individual consciousness.Technorati Tags:merlinmann, attention, email, inbox, gtd, davidallen, gettingthingsdone, organization, overload

I’m about a fourth of the way through David Allen’s outstanding book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.” I mentioned this book to a friend yesterday with the comment, “This book is going to change my life by helping me really get more organized and efficient with my use of time,” and I wasn’t kidding.On page 23 of the book, David shares the following paragraph which I think really defines “stress” for me and perhaps many others today, and also provides good insights into how that stress can be best managed. I don’t say “eliminated” because although we often use the word “stress” in negative references, we all do need a basic level of stress in our lives to keep our lives interesting and ourselves challenged. It’s only when perceived levels of stress get out of balance (or even out of control) that problems set in. Here’s what David writes:

The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can’t do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated potential failure, because you can’t do them both at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pinpointed.

As I’ve noted before, I think we often over-estimate the ability of young people to multi-task cognitive challenges and accomplish them with high levels of quality. Just because a young person is carrying on instant message conversations with six different people, watching the television, listening to an iPod, playing a GameBoy, and attempting to read a chapter in a school textbook does not mean that s/he is accomplishing anything which is cognitively challenging with a high degree of intellectual quality. The fact that a clown can juggle three balls while spinning a hula hoop around his/her waist and another one around his/her foot does not mean s/he is capable of simultaneously thinking original thoughts that might win them the Nobel Prize, or composing an original musical composition that will win a Grammy award next year. I think at many educational technology conferences, the apparent “awe” with which attendees are invited to regard the young for their abilities at multi-tasking is misplaced. Being able to be simultaneously distracted by six different sensory inputs does not necessarily mean thoughts or ideas of quality or lasting value have been conceived or communicated.Those thoughts on multi-tasking aside, I think David Allen’s point about stress being related to the number of “open loops” which your brain is trying to track at once is an excellent one. The solution he proposes to this challenge is a system which permits people to “take control of their lives” with a five-stage workflow model: collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing. I’m really enjoying his book, and think his ideas may have a great impact on my immediate as well as future “productivity” both professionally and personally. The July 2007 issue of MacWorld included a favorable review (on page 42) of the software program Midnight Inbox, a software implementation of David’s GTD (Getting Things Done) principles. I’ve downloaded a copy and will give it a spin.If you know of other GTD-based software programs you’d recommend, please let me (and others) know about them by commenting here and sharing a link.Technorati Tags:organization, gtd, gettingthingsdone, davidallen, information, overload, informationoverload, stress, solution

One of my favorite rhetorical questions to ask during workshops is, “Is anyone here NOT receiving enough email?” I don’t know an adult soul who spends time online (my own children and other kids who don’t yet have email accounts are not counted in that group) who suffers from a LACK of email. Remember “the old days” of email, when people actually got excited when they received a new email message? Those were the days of PINE email. Were we better off in those days in some respects? We certainly didn’t know how good we had it in terms of spam! According to some new research, spam accounted for 90% of all email messages sent in the month of June 2007. Good grief. In many ways, I do long for the simpler days of PINE email!I discovered the relatively new book “Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload” by Mark Hurst today, reading Steve Johnson’s article in the Chicago Tribune, “Before you click send: The rules of etiquette apply to e-mail.” According to Johnson:

…the bigger point of “Bit Literacy” is his evangelical belief that e-mail is part of a new, digital-era phenomenon, the streams of data, or “bits,” also including photos and data files that can overwhelm us if we don’t aggressively manage them. “The basic theory in e-mail and all other bitstreams is: To surmount the problem of information overload, one has to let the bits go,” Hurst says. “It does not mean that everyone should just turn off e-mail. What it means, rather, is that people need to get in the habit of looking for ways to delete, defer, delay or otherwise avoid bits because we’re effectively in an age now where bits are infinite.”

Tim Wilson recommended David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” to me in February, but I haven’t made time to read it yet. I continue to deal with bit-overload each day, however, and I think I need to read both the GTD book as well as Hurst’s thoughtful book on managing data streams. Again according to Johnson’s article:

“‘Bit Literacy’ says bits are heavy, actually, and an infinite number of them has infinite weight, and it crushes people, their productivity, their morale,” Hurst says. “Having 3,000 e-mails in your inbox is unsustainable because that’s 3,000 things asking for your attention. There’s no way to prioritize. I don’t see that there’s any possible solution but that people should learn to achieve emptiness. In e-mail, people should try to get their inbox message count to zero once every day,” Hurst says

I can count the number of days I have “lived the dream” of a “less than 10 message inbox” in the past year on one hand. Having access to email via an iPhone may help this, but as with most things involving technology I think the hardware and software solutions are just part of the remedy which is needed.A key part of this “remedy” is helping people use the correct communication modality for their purpose and context. I think many, many people are OVERUSING email today. Many people who email daily jokes to their entire distribution list would help everyone’s information overload quotient by starting a joke blog, rather than sending out email blasts. People who need an immediate response to a question are better advised to use instant messaging or the phone (yes, THE PHONE, many people seem to forget its utility in our digital world) instead. I agree with Johnson and Hurst’s observations that the LACK OF TONE in email often leads to problems which a phone call or face to face discussion could avert:

Don’t use an e-mail when the telephone is better, especially for achieving compromise or a deal or broaching a sensitive topic. E-mail, he says, is terrible at tone, and for that reason, “Send” is actually in favor of emoticons.

Johnson includes a great series of “eight reasons you might not want to e-mail” at the end of his article, quoting from Hurst’s book. Hurst’s encouragement to watch what you write/say in email because everything is archivable / forwardable and can become part of a searchable record to which you may be held accountable is important. So is the following observation about email:

You can reach everyone, but everyone can reach you.

In a post last week from NECC, I reflected on some fundamental differences between email and blogging. I wrote:

Email is potentially a “one-to-many” communication modality, but you have to have all the email addresses before you click SEND. (Or they have to be included in a distribution list or listserv.) Email is a “one-to-finite many” communication modality.Blogging is different. When someone publishes ideas on a blog, they are using a “one-to-infinite many” communication modality. I have no idea how many people will read this post, or how many people will respond. The fact that a theoretically infinite number of people could respond (or more accurately I guess, an unbounded potential number of people could read and respond) is earth shattering.

I do need to get a better handle on email, and I’m working on improving my “productivity” and “effectiveness” on that front. I think, however, we’re headed for uncharted waters when it comes to information flows that will require new levels of “bit literacy” for all of us.As a closing “sign of the times” story, I’ll note that many months ago I came across Michael Goldhaber’s 1997 article “The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net.” I have scanned the article briefly, but have yet to make time to read it in its entirety. This concept of our information landscape as an “attention economy” is something which has and continues to influence my daily thinking, however, despite the fact I have yet to make time to read the full article. Ironic.I think I’ll print out the article and read it this evening, and then make time to start David Allen’s GTD book. I’m hypothesizing both Goldhaber and Allen will have some relevant thoughts for me as I seek to improve my own “bit literacy” skills!Perhaps the #1 thing I’ve changed in the past year or so regarding my digital consumption and sharing of ideas is use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. At least when I save and “tag” websites during the day as I process information, I help insure I’ll be able to re-locate “that website I saw” sometime down the road. I think my use of del.icio.us has significantly improved both my personal productivity in the digital information environment as well as my value to others as I’m able to simultaneously share my knowledge/ideas (via those tagged and commented web links) with others. The fact that “an infinite many” others can add me to their own del.icio.us networks represents a staggering potential for connected learning I can barely fathom.It’s been a long time since I’ve been bored, and I don’t think an iPhone is going to help that cause. It may be time for another 40 day evening technology fast!

Technorati Tags: email, information, overload