Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [16]
But “more than that” is exactly what the bit world brings. Bits are infinite. In order to thrive in the digital age, we need a solution that scales up to handle any number of todos. Paper can’t scale, since it’s physically constrained by the space it occupies and our ability to see it. If someone really wanted to use sticky notes to manage their digital todos, they would have to find a place to display hundreds, if not thousands, of them.9 Paper—even in an obsessively organized notebook—is no substitute for managing bits correctly in the first place. Only bits can scale in quantity.
Paper also doesn’t scale in the amount of data it can hold, again because of physical constraints. A todo can come with an arbitrary amount of information attached, and it’s impossible to rely on paper to contain it all. For example, consider the todo of answering some questions based on several pages of meeting notes. No paper-based method—not sticky notes, not a handwritten notebook—could easily store that todo, let alone a bitstream of many such todos arriving every day. Bits, though, scale perfectly to hold any amount of data in a small container. A good example of this is the e-mail inbox, which can contain a long e-mail while only displaying a Subject line of a few words. (As shown below, a bit-literate todo list offers a similar feature.) But paper can’t scale; the more data it carries, the more physical space it occupies.
Paper and Time
The drawback of scale is secondary to an even bigger flaw. Paper is totally unable to match bits in the most important aspect of managing todos: time. Todo management, after all, is the process of managing our attention over time. When a user faces dozens of items on a todo list, the challenge isn’t to finish everything all at once, but rather to decide which todos are important to work on now versus later, and in what order. When todos are abundant, time is the scarce resource that needs to be managed.
There is no todo management without time management. Every todo has a time when it needs attention, and for many todos that time is in the future—and not until then. That’s why we often need to create a todo today for something that needs to be done in the future.
For example, when I drop off the dry cleaning on Tuesday, the cleaner tells me that the clothes will be ready for pickup on Friday. Since I’m most aware of the todo when I drop off the clothes, I should create the todo that day—Tuesday—even though the todo isn’t yet active. The question then becomes how to create the todo. One possibility is to write a sticky note and put it on the refrigerator—“pick up dry cleaning Friday”—but then I have to look at that todo for three days without being able to work on it. It’s a poor solution: either I’m needlessly distracted by the todo for several days, or I manage to ignore it, thereby rendering it useless as a reminder.
Now consider what happens when the todo doesn’t become active for a longer period—a week, or a month, or a year. For example, if the phone company overcharged your account and you want to make sure the error was corrected, you’ll have to check next month’s statement. In this case, a sticky note would be really annoying. You don’t want to be reminded every day for several weeks to check the statement next month; it’s a needless distraction, and you may train yourself to ignore it by the time it becomes relevant. Instead, you should only begin to be reminded at that later date. A paper calendar might handle a few such reminders, but only in small quantity and with little or no accompanying data.
Now take the two examples above—the dry cleaning and the phone bill—and multiply them by a thousand. That’s the scale of todos in the bit world, and no paper solution can come close to addressing it. Bit literacy