All Things

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

Friday Peter F. Drucker, often credited with founding the field of management science, died at his home.

It was perhaps ironic that Drucker died on Armistice (Veterans) Day, as he once attributed the quick start in his career to being placed early in positions that should have been given to men in the middle of their careers, except Europe in the 1930s didn’t have such men. They had most all died in the War. Gifted with the ability to see and clarify trends years ahead of others, Drucker left Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and London, for the U.S., in 1937.

Drucker was one of a handful of prescient Austrians of the 20th century, able to see past the blur of rapid technological change and political upheaval to discern more fundamental social issues and the need for moral action. Unlike Ludwig von Mises‘ analysis of macroeconomics or F.A. Hayek’s work in sociology, Drucker ostensibly focussed on management of profit and non-profit organizations (including government), and managing oneself. Nevertheless, his insights into social trends were some of his most valuable contributions.

Drucker’s own preference was for French economist J.B. Say, who supposedly coined the term “entrepreneur” around 1800. Innovation and “knowledge work”, a term Drucker himself originated, were always important topics in his writings, including his valuable Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Drucker frequently emphasized the need for receptivity to the unexpected market and for disciplined abandonment of yesterday’s successes. In this he seemed to parallel the thought of yet another Austrian, famed economist of innovation Joseph Schumpeter, with his similar concept of “creative destruction” as the driver of growth in an economy.

Regarding Drucker’s impact on my own life, I first discovered his works as a sophomore engineering student, while volunteering with an organization known as the World Space Foundation. WSF was trying a new, non-profit approach to space exploration, and garnered some attention for its work on developing a solar sail spacecraft, though its greatest contribution was likely in the area of Earth-crossing asteroid research.

At this time NASA was really in a funk concerning lunar exploration, which had completely dried up (and would remain so for another dozen years, until the military’s Clementine spacecraft and, after a long history of determined development, Lunar Prospector). I was intrigued with the possibility that maybe we could do a lot with even modest funds in a non-profit context.

Having already concluded some time previously that innovative organizational forms might play an enabling role in space development, over the next couple of years I developed an appreciation for management science and for Drucker’s works in particular. Drucker’s thought-provoking books have always proved fascinating, even if not so easy to apply directly, and were an engrossing introduction to the study of management.

Eventually I concluded that a non-profit organization would have a difficult time maintaining enough control to pursue a long-term research program, but that for-profit enterprises might do this effectively, though much discovery and innovation in the areas of organizational and individual function was still needed. This area of research, in fact, has been my primary focus for the past 18 years.

Perhaps Drucker’s best-loved book is The Effective Executive, originally published in 1966. Drucker described it as a real-world treatment of the subject, and argued that effectiveness was a set of practices that must be learned - and practiced - starting with the executive’s managing of his time, not the work itself. Newt Gingrich, after capturing the House of Representatives for the Republican Party and becoming Speaker, credited the book with guiding his success, which led to a new surge in its popularity.

One of Drucker’s strengths was his ability to see that management, as a discipline, transcended particular organizational forms. He was equally interested in improving effectiveness in both the profit and non-profit sectors, and his latest brief but valuable work, published this year, was Managing Oneself.

It is in the profit realm, however, that Drucker’s comments are sometimes most difficult to unravel. His discussion (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Ch. 6) of the role of business, and of profit in particular, is thought-provoking yet seemingly incomplete. Similarly, some of the concepts brought out early in Managing for Results beg to be pursued at a conceptual level rather than with the detailed analysis of product contributions that follows.

As with any great researcher, Drucker was as adept at asking the right questions as answering them. I continue to find his works profitable reading, however that may be defined!

Mitch Wagner had an interesting article on his blog at InformationWeek recently about David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and using PDAs to manage to-do lists, etc.

Wagner is right that “GTD has spawned a thriving subculture online.” In reading others’ blogs, etc., I find myself frequently drawn to sites whose author either uses a Mac and/or who’s written about GTD. I guess that’s sort of the intersection of my interests with a lot of others, i.e. personal productivity and creativity.

I’m not quite sure what Wagner meant when he wrote, “the popularity of GTD and related productivity philosophies has spawned a sort of backlash against Palm Pilots and other PDAs”. The PDA is still a great concept, though I think Palm has forgotten the form factor’s obvious weaknesses, i.e. a very small screen and lack of keyboard.

If Palm would put more emphasis on a better/slightly bigger screen and put decent keyboards on more models, I think they’d be moving forward again. While connectivity is certainly helpful, they seem stuck on adding more multimedia features, but I don’t see many teens buying Palms, anyway, and what I really want is for them to keep advancing the productivity software.

Anyway, here’s the comment I left on Wagner’s blog:

I read GTD a couple of years ago and now am reading Allen’s newer book, Ready for Anything. It is a discussion of many nitty-gritty productivity issues with a lot of useful tips and will be helpful to many who are having trouble implementing the GTD approach.

I’m amazed how this bandwagon of opinion has arisen that PCs are dying and PDAs as well. PDAs will become increasingly connected, I suppose, but that’s just a semantics issue in compiling statistics. I use my Palm constantly. At the same time, one of my biggest frustrations is not having enough time to really take advantage of all the wonderful software tools available on my Mac. These are both very useful tools for me.

What hasn’t worked for me (and apparently for a lot of others) are all the to-do list tools. The to-do list is the only part of my Palm that I really don’t use much. I think there’s some kind of problem with to-do lists that no one’s figured out yet. Lists are very helpful for planning and breaking down complex activities but unless we pretty much get everything done each day, the lists just start to grow to where they’re no longer of much help.

David Allen’s approach is basically to write everything down and review it on a regular basis, not to work off a to-do list. Instead, by clearing things out of your head, you can effectively keep the day’s list in your active memory, and actually concentrate on one thing at a time.