Information fragmentation – it’s the enemy
January 27, 2009 – 10:23 pmAs I fight my usually losing battle to use my computer tools to get better organized, I’ve come to understand that the major enemy is information fragmentation. My world consists of emails, web bookmarks, calendar items, blog postings and comments, forum threads, to-do items, bugs, notes, files, contacts, projects, etc., etc., and each of these have a variety of often mutually exclusive applications to manage them. Each clever new idea – Facebook, Twitter, whatever – adds a new dimension to an already overwhelming problem.
And so far, I have only mentioned one dimension of information fragmentation, that of application fragmentation. A second is device fragmentation, where for example we keep contacts on our phones, laptops, work and home desktops, and rolodex. A third is people fragmentation, when we work together and each of us has a different set of data about the same project.
Wiiliam Jones of the University of Washington discusses these issues quite a bit in his book “Keeping Found Things Found” and in related websites and reports. In the book, he presents the big decision as being do we centralize around email, or abandon email. In the report “Towards a unification & integration of PIM support”, he mentions possible integration strategies as revolving around various themes: integration around
- projects
- search
- properties (think tags)
- representation (think RDF)
- time
- a digital recording of “everything”
- organizing techniques and strategies
As I look toward trying to focus my efforts on a major project, I am dedicated to reducing information fragmentation – but with a particular emphasis. Just to be clear, here is some key approaches that I believe in.
Organize by dimension
Information needs to be organized in a number of key dimensions. Those are at least:
- Project
- Role (for example, I am a husband, Mozilla contributor, and church soundman).
- Context (which is one of the great insights of GTD, that tasks can only be accomplished in a particular enviroment, such as “doing errands” or “at church”)
- Contact
Use a single dashboard application
I am also a firm believer that I should use a single information dashboard application to manage the daily flow of activities. In most cases, that is a generalized email application, though emails may be primarily notifications of events rather than personal communications.
Information management is about proactive decisions
As I manage the flow of my information, I am not just reacting to what is incoming – I am proactively deciding to take action, recording those actions, and initiating new actions based on those decisions. Metadata pertaining to my information items, and tools to organize information into action, are key to an effective application.
In the categories presented by William Jones, I represent a position of “everything is email” but “organize around project”. I generally agree with the approach taken by Victoria Bellotti of PARC.
In an upcoming blog I hope to come down from the stratosphere, and describe some specific functionality I would like to implement to move this forward.
The best thing I saw in this (information defrag) direction is Google Wave. I saw it demo’ed yesterday at Google Developer Day and I was stunned by the way it unifies e-mail, IM, Wiki, Forums and similar.
You are onto something here, stay in the stratosphere for a while to reinforce the motivation for Getting This Done. You have shown insight on this issue.
From my perspective, the dashboard application is v similar to the benefit of carrying a (Win) mobile device around with contacts task etc. This is what connects the dimensions, or at least lets you write a note about one when you are in another. So I’d suggest that ultimately the connection between the application (TBird) and portability is the key.
As an aside, I think the last information feed to be captured by the likes of GWave will be the files on the harddrive. They are there because we are loathe to make them available for searching!