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of the last decade are indeed slowing, and there is now concern that most executives don't know how to reignite them: "The latest productivity numbers extend a trend that has led many on Wall Street and in academia to wonder whether the U.S. can keep boosting its productivity as much as it has in the recent past."58 What this article misses—along with every other report—is that there is a way to increase the productivity rate again. This time, however, it won't come from investing in new technology, but rather from working with and leveraging existing technology in a new way. Bit literacy is the answer: it can raise productivity for a company or an entire industry, as much as it can for an individual worker.

Almost ten years ago, Mark took me up on the challenge to turn bit literacy from his personal tool into an approach accessible to everyone. For several years Mark and I have taught bit literacy to our employees at Creative Good, and we've measured significant results. Based on our annual measures of productivity, we have doubled the effectiveness of our employees, even as their level of overload has decreased.

Now it's up to you. Use this book to apply the methods of bit literacy. Let us know how it goes, and feel free to contact us for help.

E-mail Mark and me at comments@bitliteracy.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Phil Terry

CEO, Creative Good

New York City

www.creativegood.com

More resources: www.bitliteracy.com

Footnotes

1 The American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon pioneered methods of encoding and transmitting digital data, which made the Internet possible. He mentioned "bits" in a 1948 paper, though according to Wikipedia, he credited statistician John Tukey with coining the word.

2 Compared to the wide organic diversity of atoms, which come in all sizes and configurations, bits are limited to two states: 1 or 0, on or off. Maybe it’s the close proximity of opposites that causes such frequent paradox in the bit world.

3 Fans of The Matrix will remember what Neo says at the climactic point of the movie, when he achieves his full power in the bit world: he says “no.”

4 There are exceptions, of course. For example, users can—and should—unsubscribe from newsletters that they don’t need. And in a team or office environment, bit literacy training can teach people how to reduce the amount of irrelevant e-mail they send to coworkers.

5 If you maintain multiple e-mail accounts, you should empty each of them daily—a good reason to keep e-mail accounts to a minimum.

6 I use a “white list” service called SpamArrest, but there are many spam-fighting tools to choose from.

7 You can also send an FYI to yourself by CC’ing or BCC’ing yourself when you e-mail someone else. This is a good way to document an e-mail you’ve sent.

8 In addition to a work account and a personal account, some bit-literate users also maintain a “junk account” to use when registering for websites, so that it can accumulate any spam mail that comes in as a result. Of course, this doesn’t need to be emptied daily.

9 Sticky Notes, a popular software program a few years back, allowed users to plaster the entire screen with virtual slips of paper, as though the edges of the physical monitor just weren’t big enough. The virtual notes had all the drawbacks of real paper—clutter, distraction, lack of scale—and almost none of the advantages of bits.

10 As of February 2007 the official Outlook help page on Microsoft’s website lists a fourteen-step process for creating a todo from an e-mail: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012293021033.aspx

11 Still other requested features include AJAX, RSS, and other faddish acronyms that are only understood by techies and the journalists who love them.

12 For this reason I named my college comic strip “Firehose Tavern.” The jokes were about that good.

13 Khoi Vinh writing on subtraction.com, November 29, 2006.

14 Domains are case-insensitive. That means that nytimes.com, NYTIMES.COM, and NYTimes.coM are all the same domain. However, everything in the URL to the right