my branch, take two – bring on the sap
i don’t know about you, but i’m overloaded by all the talk about information overload.
between the news reports, bestsellers, and advertisements about the next best way to whisk us back to a simpler life, it’s easy to start feeling a bit jaded, and to want to build a wall between ourselves and all that nonsense. we all do our best to keep our eyes front and focus on the things that matter, and walling ourselves off is one of the ways that we manage.
but walling ourselves off is also dangerous. it reinforces our stereotypes, and keeps us from making the connections between different worlds of information that could allow us to solve some of our most pressing problems.
when we are excited by information, rather than overwhelmed by it, then we can do some really amazing things, but as long as we are overwhelmed, we are more likely to push new ideas away, surround ourselves with only what is already familiar, and distract ourselves with whatever we have at hand.
now i’m going to say something that might not make much sense.
i don’t believe that we are really overwhelmed by information.
what actually overwhelms us are the decisions we need to make in order to process information.
what is it?
how is it like or unlike other things we already know about?
what might we use it for?
how will we find it if we need it later?
these decisions take time and energy, and performing them for every piece of information that crosses our radar is impossible.
so things fly by us, we lose track of what they are and whether they are important, we aren’t sure if we’ll be able to find them later, and we worry that we are making bad choices.
this stresses us out, and makes us build walls.
one of the walls we tend to build is around technology.
since technology, and particularly computers, are the source of so much of our decision overload, we tend to
every once in a while a new gizmo comes out that promises to make things better, and there are always those few geeky people who believe that we are crossing a new frontier of superproductivity where we will all be able to write great novels and learn to do the cha cha while running a business and fitting in a midafternoon nap, and all thanks to the latest and greatest mobile wifi superlight mindreading fingertop computer.
but for the most part
i think that this is a dangerous misconception, but to change it we have to focus less on gadgetry that makes more decisions possible and more on whatever it takes to make decisions easier. one of the principal decisions that we have to make for each piece of information we encounter is a decision about annotation.
annotation boils down to where we put things.
where we put things boils down to how we’ll find them later.
if we always knew that we could find things when we went looking for them, there’d be a lot less to worry about.
this year i have looked at email in order to learn more about the problems that people have with knowing where to put or find things, and to explore new ways that we might be able to think about the design of email systems in order to make those decisions easier. designers have begun to realize that there is a lot we can do to increase the number of ways that people can manage their email, but current interfaces don’t really do very much to help people know what the options are, and so the feeling of overload is not dispelled.