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Disbelief in information overload
There's a Zen koan that tells of a hurried and stressed businessman who comes to a Zen master for guidance. The Zen master sits down and pours the visitor a cup of tea. But even after the tea fills the cup, the Zen master continues to pour, allowing the tea to spill all over the table. The businessman says, "Stop pouring the tea! The cup is full and can't hold any more." The Zen master replies, "So it is with you. You can't accept any guidance unless you make some empty space first."
I think about that koan a lot as I advocate for bit literacy - a set of skills that focus on letting the bits go, thus liberating people to be in charge of their lives, and not enslaved to their technology. (I just wrote a book about it.) People are generally receptive to the idea, but occasionally I meet (or read a review from) someone who dismisses the idea. "Why bother?" they say. "I have thousands of e-mails to reply to, todos to act on, blogs to read, and files to organize, and I feel fine. It would be a waste of time to make an empty space." Meanwhile the tea pours all over their desk.
More often than not this reaction comes from intelligent, well-meaning, good people who just happen not to believe in information overload. Such is the case with the review of Bit Literacy in Salon.com two weeks ago, in a piece called Empty thine in-box, by my friend Scott Rosenberg. He writes:
"Hurst's method is, at its heart, profoundly alien. ... [My e-mail inbox] contains 16,694 messages. Once, I suppose, [it] must have had a zero message count -- maybe back in 1991, when I got my first e-mail account. It has not seen zero since.
"Yet I do not struggle ... My inbox is not a desk that must be cleared. It is a river from which I can always easily fish whatever needs my attention. Why try to push the river? ... Do we really want the job of in-box attendant and e-mail folder file clerk?"
Scott, and most of the other vocal skeptics of the method, share one thing in common: they have never actually tried becoming bit-literate. They pass judgment on it from the outside. Imagine a movie reviewer holding forth on a movie he never saw, or a foodie evaluating an untasted dish. Funny.
There can be many reasons why people dismiss the idea out of hand. For starters, it can be hard to admit that one needs help, or needs to change at all. It's often more comfortable to stay up-to-date with the latest tools. Whatever the technology industry releases or upgrades, and whatever the technology press (and blogosphere) says is "hot," is what some people immediately flock to. (Nice techie, good techie, sit, stay, roll over.)
But often, at the heart of the argument - and I think this is the case with Scott's piece - is a philosophical difference. The first sentence in Bit Literacy is "Bits are heavy." That's the hook of the book - the lever upon which the entire argument rests - and I think some people disagree right away. They believe that bits are weightless, frictionless, and can only help us. The more information, the better.
Thus I was happy to come across a piece in The Economist, called Too much information (reg. required), that supports my case:
More information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. [One] study ... gave horse-racing handicappers varying amounts of information when ranking horses. The more information they received, the more confident they became about their answers. But the success of their predictions was actually worse when given 40 pieces of information, than when given five.
It only makes sense. Too much information, at some point, will begin to decrease one's effectiveness. That's what Barry Schwartz wrote about in The Paradox of Choice, after all. Why is it so hard for people to accept that idea when it comes to managing their information? (Because it requires admitting that you need to change.)
It's not a difficult concept to grasp. If information overload exists at all, it follows logically that, at some degree of overload, people should make some empty space. Let the bits go.
However, if you don't believe that bits are heavy, and you don't believe in information overload, or Barry's book, or my book, or The Economist piece, then by all means, continue pouring the tea. Far be it from me, or anyone else, to tell you that your cup is only so big.
- - -
See also:
• Bit Literacy, the book on these concepts
• Barry Schwartz interviewed in Good Experience (Jan. 20, 2005)
• My interview on TomPeters.com
Mark, I'm a big fan of yours but I disagree with the premise that having an empty inbox is the only bit literate solution. To be fair, you coined (helped coin?) "bit literacy" and should be given some leeway on the definition; but I reject the premise that my inbox adds clutter. My favorite solution to this problem is certainly gmail. I can star things that still need attention, everything else is either read or unread. Search is the new filing paradigm - I maintain a complete record of everything, and any 'bit friction' that results from not deleting useful information is outweighed on the front end by saving time on the delete process.
My corporate Outlook email doesn't leave me nearly as satisfied, but I use gootodo as a proxy for stars and Google desktop as a proxy for searches.
Incidentally, I have tried your approach - I just don't believe that one-size-fits-all in this case. I just don't feel the weight of *those* bits (not to imply that I don't believe in other instances of information overload).
When I graduated from high school in 1986 we didn't have computer classes, we took typing. I had to attend driver's ed to get my license, and I had to take a birthing class to have a baby. Technology is an integral part of our everyday lives, but most of us have no real idea how it works or how to manage it. We let it manage us.
Kudos to Mark Hurst for writing Bit Literacy -- a polite, plain Engligh crash course in basic computer etiquette and common sense behavior that most of us (who didn't go to MIT) didn't get over the course of our educations. It's the kindergarten foundation material we never got but desperately need to understand the tools we're already using.
I haven't managed to maintain a totally empty email box, and I'm still working out a few calendar issues, but I have to say that I feel infinitely more productive and in control of my technology.
Now, instead of kvetching with colleagues about the amount of email in my inbox, I can feel smug knowing that my electronic "house" is in order, and man it feels good!
"empty your cup" is one of the lessons from Bruce Lee in Joe Hyam's book Zen in the Martial Arts: http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Martial-Arts-Joe-Hyams/dp/0553275593
re: Disbelief in information overload
Wow, very evangelical post.
"thus liberating people to be in charge of their lives" - Translation: without the one true way, you cannot find peace.
Regarding the beautiful Zen Koan: Are you trying to say making space in one's life and one's inbox are the same thing?
"they have never actually tried becoming bit-literate" translation: they have never tried my one true way.
"it can be hard to admit that one needs help" - translation: everyone is in denial of this problem I found.
"The first sentence in Bit Literacy is 'Bits are heavy.'" - translation: If you just believe this fundamental truism, you will be able to see with open eyes.
I think you get my drift. I am advocating less black and white "religion", and more acceptance of other styles and approaches. They might not need your religion, or just maybe, any religion.
It's nice to keep the inbox free. And I manage to do it at work. I have to say that outlook 2007 and it's implementation of tasks, and vista's search, have made this all possible.
I don't delete emails, I just move them to a folder. If there was something for me to do, I flagged it before moving and it goes in my task list, just like gootodo.
But the home email is piling up like crazy. Now I need to install outlook 2007 at home and triage.
BTW: I find the gmail interface extremely annoying, because I can't move all those mailing lists out of my sight. There should be a way to see only things NOT tagged!
Bits can be heavy or light. Bits that need action are heavy. Bits that are waiting to serve me are light. I keep my mailbox "empty" by having no unread messages most of the time. Once they are read, they're gone! (in my mind). But they are still waiting to serve me, via search (or sorting, or whatever).
The reality in my life is that I need a lot of information available. I could file it and keep my inbox empty, but there's too much, and it's too inter-related, for a filing system to be useful for finding it. Better not to deal with figuring out how to file it (filing systems ARE heavy!), and let it just sit there and be its own meta-information, so when I need it my search tools will find it.
I empty my mind by not emptying (filing) my inbox.
I like what Nils says, and I will rephrase: to-do items are heavy; things that don't need action are light.
I contend that the important thing is to cross things off of the to-do list, not to hide to-do items somewhere else. If working towards the goal of getting the inbox empty is a way of jumpstarting the process of crossing things off, fine. But just moving things from the inbox to a to-do folder doesn't help that process.
Furthermore, moving to-do items to a different place can be actively harmful. I worked with a LOT of people when I was working on my _Overcome Email Overload_ books, and I heard over and over from people, "If it isn't in my inbox, I will forget about it." They found that moving things they needed to act upon out of their inbox was counterproductive.
One way that inbox messages *are* heavy has to do with guilt. Over and over, I heard people a huge amount of guilt over not filing their messages "properly". This wasn't guilt about not doing the tasks, there was guilt about not *filing* the messages.
When I gave people permission to not file, or to only have one "Done" folder (what Google calls the "Archive" folder), I saw a huge sense of relief. I had taken the heavy "file messages in the inbox" task off of their to-do list, and they felt much better afterwards.
I'm not saying all this because I am blissfully ignorant of the One True Way, I'm saying all this because I actually went out into the field and observed people using email. I also read boodles of academic literature where other people observed people in the field. (I strongly recommend Whittaker and Sidner's 1996 paper, and Olle Balter's 2000 paper. You can see my bibliography at http://www.webfoot.com/advice/academicBiblio2005.php .)
My advice, after all of my research and observation, is to let the *guilt* go. For some people, they will only be able to let the guilt go if they process it all -- fine. But it is much less work to just let the guilt go.
Lukas: to make those mailing lists disappear from the inbox, create a filter. (There's a link just to the right of "Search the Web".)
Set up criteria for what messages match the mailing list -- usually it will be something like "to flossers@flossrecycling.com", and go to the next page. On the next page, put a check in "Skip the Inbox" and "Apply a Label". Give it a label (like "Flossers"), and click on "Create Filter". There you go.
This is sort of like creating a folder and moving all mailing list messages to the folder. The label "Flossers" will go bold when there are unread messages in that group.
You might also enjoy putting more-important groups higher up than less-important groups. You can do this by making the labels alphabetize. The easiest way to
do this is to put a letter at the beginning of the label name, e.g. "a-Spouse", "b-Boss", "c-Colleagues", ..., "h-Flossers", ..., "w-WordOfTheDay", ..., "zzzz-DuckySherwood", etc.
I am in agreement with Gerry Power.