Riding the Current: How to deal with the daily deluge of data (Book 5 of 30)

Title: Riding the Current: How to deal with the daily deluge of data
Author: Madelyn Blair

Note the nice alliteration in the sub-title (Deal with the Daily Deluge of Data).   It's supposed to help people remember. It sticks in people's minds.  Two immediate related thoughts come to mind:

1. I attended a talk a while ago by an author (whose name escapes me at the moment), who mentioned this alliteration approach as a useful technique for people to remember you and your work.  Lisa... first name Lisa.... Lisa Horn? [Sorry, it's Sam Horn]  I'm following her on LinkedIn.  I don't think I have her book.  She was also making the point that people have very short attention spans.  The cover of her book is a fish... something related to the attention span of a goldfish.

2. Made to Stick... that was another book by the Heath brothers (Chip and Dan) which had to do with attention span.  Really?  I'm not sure that was about attention span at all.  Wasn't it about change, behavioral change, adopting new habits?

Is there a point to this stream of consciousness?  Let's just say that like everyone else, my memory isn't perfect but there are always remnants of memories or connections that can be recalled, however imperfect they are.

Why I liked this book?

Dr. Blair's book is a very nicely written, practical approach to personal information management.  Given that 1) our capacity for absorbing information has limits; 2) we keep getting bombarded by information sources (many of which we purposefully seek out), how can we make the most of the wealth of information that surrounds us, not to mention deal with information validity?

I also really appreciate the approach because it's not just about information management from a time management perspective.  It treats the subject with a strong learning focus.    Finally, Dr. Blair stretches the "riding the current" metaphor throughout with chapters like "selecting the vessel", "finding the right crew", etc... which adds a little fun.  Who wants to read a boring book?  Who actually reads books these days? Who has time?  Who takes the time?

How does it fit with Knowledge Management?
This book fits squarely in what I refer to as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).  Individuals who have a strong awareness of their own personal knowledge management are more receptive to KM and organizational learning efforts at the team, project and enterprise-wide levels. I suppose that's a hypothesis more than a fact-based assertion.


Oh.. Madelyn Blair is also delightful in person.  If you hear she's doing a talk in your neck of the woods, go for it.

The Intentional Information Diet

I read through Clay Johnson's The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption.  It could have been subtitled "A Case for Mindful Consumption" but then we wouldn't have the wonderful alliteration (three Cs) in the subtitle.

I like the analogy between food consumption and information consumption, including how both have gone awry and how we should get back on track with more conscious consumption, starting with an awareness of what we our putting in our bodies and heads.  I also agree that it is a matter of personal responsibility.  We can no more blame the junk food producers than we can blame the junk media producers for our consumption.  We have a choice, even if it takes some effort.  The path of least resistance leads us to junk, unfortunately, because that's what we crave, in news as in food.

Looking at my food consumption, I could quickly say that my worst habit is failing to consume enough water.  No need for fancy analysis.  I have known this for a long time and I have yet to find a way to adopt a healthy habit around it.  It's supposed to be simple.  Carry a water bottle around, drink all day.  It's not that simple apparently because I can't stick with it.

Drawing my own information consumption map also led to some useful insights.  In particular, I was able to identify a couple of distracting and unhealthy information habits.

Here's to 2017:  More water, less Facebook. It's as simple as that.  Simple.  I didn't say easy.

My approach to information consumption is slightly different, though.  I tend to have a strong "learning" focus.  My information diet is more intentional and targeted.  For me, being more conscious of the information we consume isn't sufficient.  I would recommend being highly focused in seeking out specific information, otherwise it's very easy to become overwhelmed to a lot of random, interesting stuff.  Some randomness is good though.  Total randomness doesn't add up to a lot of learning.  I would start with a mix of 80% targeted information meant to address a specific learning goal, making sure it's not all affirmation building; and 20% random information.  In practice, I'm not sure how that would happen.

In addition, the term "information" is too broad in this context of information consumption.  We consume information in the form of news, entertainment, communications, and all of it isn't necessarily coming from our computer screen and smartphones.

Related Readings:

• Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is Rewiring our Brains,
  I had blogged about it here.   Clay Johnson's book came out a year later. 
• Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read.
  Take a shortcut if you'd like and listen to the TEDTalk: Beware Online "filter bubble". 
• Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

Understanding Information Overload: Email

"When the amount of information available to be filtered is effectively unlimited, as is the case on the Net, then every improvement in the quality of filters will make information overload worse." Situational overload and Ambient Overload (Nicholas Carr, March 11, 2011)

In his post on "Situational Overload and Ambient Overload," Nicholas Carr differentiates between too types of issues:  Situational overload refers to the ability of finding the needle in the haystack (or our ability to search for something specific), while ambient overload refers to our ability to filter the unending rivers of information that are available to us to find things that are of interest to us.

In short, Clay Sharky's often quoted statement that "It's not information overload, it's filter failure" (Clay Sharky, Web 2.0 Expo) doesn't address all the angles of the information overload problem.

I was struck by this statement by Nicholas Carr because it helped me deepen my understanding of the confusion most people seem to experience around the words "information overload."  When people complain of information overload, they'll often use email as an example and mention that they receive hundreds of email every day, immediately followed by a statement to the effect that if they read all their emails, they'd have no time for real work.

I don't receive hundreds of email at work -- and I should be thankful for that -- but as an experiment, I started collecting in a folder all the messages that I receive that I consider to be a waste of my time and I should never have received.  I should mention here that we have an excellent spam filter and all the unnecessary email I am collecting are internal to the organization.  Most of these email messages come from individuals making use of distribution lists. Half of the messages don't apply to me at all, meaning that I am not the intended audience for that message. There are particularly annoying examples of this: 1) the message reminding me to submit my timesheet, which would be nice, except that I'm a contractor and I work on a different timesheet schedule; 2) the message advertizing all the wonderful training opportunities -- for which I don't qualify.

To address the problem, I have a number of options:
1) unsubscribe from these lists
That is not necessarily an option since I didn't subscribe in the first place.  I was automatically added based on my various organizational identities.
2) create an email rule to automatically divert all these messages to a folder and review/delete when I have time
3) create a rule that is specific enough to automatically delete the specific messages without targeting all messages to the offending distribution lists;
4) have a friendly conversation with the sender(s).

Then there's the occasional "donuts in the kitchen" announcement, which might be useful to some, but I don't work in the building where that kitchen is located, so again, that distribution list doesn't work for me.

Then there's the "I wanted to make sure you all receive this" message, when the message referenced has clearly been sent to every single individual in the organization.  Either the sender hasn't seen that the message was sent to everyone or the sender doesn't trust the recipients to read emails addressed to everyone, but they trust the reader to read emails from him/her.

In the work situation, I don't have complete control over what I receive and I have to pick my battles.  This one is probably not significant enough to turn it into a skirmish, but multiplied by thousands of employees receiving a dozen or more unnecessary emails a day, there may be a case of action.

My personal email inbox is another story.  Even without spam, I do get many more emails there and I make extensive use of filters to screen things efficiently and not miss important messages.  In my work inbox, I can't afford not to screen every message, even if only to delete.  In my home inbox, most of what I receive are things I asked for (notifications, subscriptions, etc...) but don't need to read until the weekend or don't have to read at all if I'm pressed for time.  That's the ambient overload aspect of the information problem, the same problem I encounter with RSS feeds I subscribe to and most of my use of Twitter.  That is something I can control.  I can decide how much time to spend screening Twitter feeds and RSS feeds. I can skip a whole week and not have to worry about it.  It's not essential to my existence.  Nothing will happen if I miss a week's worth of Twitter or a week's worth of RSS feeds.

Related articles

• Information overload? Time to relax (guardian.co.uk)
• Jenna Wortham Asks Readers For Help With Her Information Overload (observer.com)
• Gmail Unveils Another Weapon Against Email Overload: Smart Labels (techcrunch.com)
• FYI: TMI: Toward a holistic social theory of information overload (downes.ca)

Learning at the Speed of Change

Sometimes there's a word or a phrase that catches my attention. Perhaps it's just a few words that appear to perfectly encapsulate a thought or a feeling. "Learning at the speed of change" is one of those. We rejoice about our increased ability to communicate. We can communicate more often, with more people, with more tools. Most of that seems to be about quantity (How many twitter followers do you have?). Are we communicating better or just "more"?

At the same time, we complain about information overload. In fact, just as the quantity of information we have access to doesn't guarantee anything about the decisions we make, the fact that we can and we do communicate more doesn't guarantee that we're communicating better. The overload (of information and communication) might become a distraction if we're not able to increase our ability to focus.

"Learning at the speed of change" is a reference to the fact that change is the only constant and the speed of change is increasing. Information overload is only going to get worse and it would be nice if were collectively able to focus our attention on two things:

1) the quality of our communications; and
2) our ability to extract value from massive amounts of information.

We need to learn faster. We probably need to become better lifelong learners as well. If the pace of change is increasing, our ability to learn continuously and faster is going to be critical. Yes, the vast amounts of information now at our fingertips and the many, many tools we now have at our disposal to communicate and learn from each other are wonderful. They will really provide value if and when we learn to collectively harness their potential.

Some possible implications for Knowledge Management:

• Pay more attention to meta-learning (learning about learning)
  Very little attention is paid to the connection between personal learning styles, group learning and organizational learning. The connection between personal learning styles, personal learning strategies (& personal knowledge management) on the one hand, and organizational learning and traditional knowledge management initiatives on the other, is missing.
  
  
• Treat knowledge as a very dynamic thing
  If you are going to try to capture and store knowledge, it will need to be in formats that are easy to edit so that it doesn't quickly become outdated. The types of knowledge that you should be focused on will also change rapidly.
  
  
• Accompany the introduction of new tools
  Don't just demo new tools to show people how to start using them. Accompany the new users in figuring out how to handle those tools strategically from an information overload perspective. Accompany the users in climbing the learning curve and learn with them.
  
  
• Keep an eye on the trade-offs between speed and depth of learning
  You can use Cliff Notes or Spark Notes to make sure you've really understood a difficult piece of literature and to facilitate your learning and preparation for a test or you can use them as a cheat sheet to pretend you've read the book and try to pass a test with minimal time investment on your part.

All of this is assuming that we all need to catch up or keep up with change. Does this also imply that if you want to make change happen, you need to be learning even faster, you need to be the one ahead of the crowd, making all the mistakes that followers will learn from and avoid? Does it mean that in order to lead change rather than react to it, we need to learn FASTER than the speed of change?

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• Zen and the art of (dis)connecting (nationalpost.com)
• Downsizing the Verbal Economy (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• Personal Knowledge Management Plan (knowledgefordevelopment.com)
• Clay Shirky About Filter Failure (awkwardconnections.org)
• The Science of Lifelong Learning (curiouslypersistent.wordpress.com)