Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [15]
Users need a robust tool, then, to manage todos: something outside the e-mail program that prioritizes todos in a bit-literate way—letting the bits go—and protects the user from undue stress. And it has to be a single tool, so that users can find all their todos in one place. Users can’t prioritize or focus very well if they’re maintaining multiple lists. It’s a tall order for one tool. So what do most users choose?
Paper. Usually many pieces of paper. Often painfully many. Small, fluorescent squares crowding the sides of computer monitors, cluttering whole workspaces; scribbled receipts and cocktail napkins, stuffed into pockets, posted on refrigerator doors, thrown into piles. Notebooks filled with scrawl, file folders with little colored tabs, printouts of reminders and instructions. Paper. Reams of it, decks of it, stacks of it, cluttering our eye-level view and scattered about underfoot; paper, filling up our lives, distracting our senses, getting in the way, and awaiting, someday, a laborious cleanout and final shredding. In anything but small amounts, using paper for todos is a plague on productivity. It is not the tool for the job.
Today’s information overload is caused by bits, and so the tool to manage the overload must work with bits. Using paper to manage todos simply does not make sense. A long time ago it was the best choice, but today it’s slow, unnecessarily painful, and more than a little ridiculous. You might as well do all your business travel on horseback.
This doesn’t stop some people from trying out paper-based solutions. Some companies today sell methods that promise to get people organized with a complex array of notebooks, folders, and other paper-based tools—all sold, of course, by those same companies. Beyond the obvious flaw of being based in paper, the sheer complexity of these methods is both a selling point (it looks more powerful that way) and a barrier to anyone who actually wants to get things done. The more flowcharts and frameworks in the method, the more time it takes to learn and practice, and the less productive the user becomes. Complex paper-based methods are great for selling seminars and associated materials; they’re just not good at making people productive. What people need today is a simple, elegant bit-based method that allows them to get to work as quickly as possible: bit literacy.
Still, most people today use paper to manage their todos—not as part of any special paper-based method or system, but because paper is what they have on hand. They’ve never learned anything different, and besides, little fluorescent paper squares are sort of fun to look at. The problem is that these notes, if used in any significant number, cause clutter. The scene is so familiar that it’s almost a cliché: the computer monitor ringed with sticky notes, overlapping and competing for the user’s attention. The mess is symptomatic of the user’s underlying lack of bit literacy. It’s as though the bits, running wild inside the computer, have spilled out onto the monitor in paper form.
Paper is invaluable for jotting down the occasional note, but it’s not good for managing todos. Thus bit literacy calls for the user to minimize their use of paper and use a bit-based system to manage their todos. To explain the bit-literate method, we must first examine why, exactly, paper is so ineffective.
There are two reasons why bit-literate users must not rely on paper to manage their todos: scale and time.
Paper and Scale
Scale is always a problem when we try to apply paper solutions to bit-based problems. Paper notes are effective only in small