Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. By Mark Hurst. New York: Good Experiences Press, 2007. 180 p. (ISBN 978-0-9793681-0-3).
Mark Hurst provides a set of tools in this book to help the busy, information overloaded worker regain control of their work and home environments. By following these tools the user will become “Bit Literate” and be able to spend their time doing the work they are paid to do rather than being overwhelmed the sheer volume of unsorted information they are confronted with.
Hurst identifies the misuse of the e-mail inbox as one of the main reasons that people become overwhelmed. He feels that people use the inbox for many purposes for which it was never meant such as a todo list, a filing system, a calendar, their bookmarks list, and an address book. As he says, “[t]he inbox is appropriate only as a temporary holding place for e-mails, briefly, before they’re deleted or moved elsewhere.” (loc. 273). By moving e-mails out of the inbox and into the appropriate location, be it your web browser’s bookmarks, your address book, or whatever todo list that you use, you can become far more organized and spend less time searching for what you need. Hurst is a proponent of the “zero inbox” theory that says that you should strive to keep your inbox empty by moving items to the appropriate location as they arrive. This is the chief “hack” offered in the book and many of the other hacks build upon this concept.
After you have moved everything from your inbox the next hack Hurst suggests is that you do the same thing for your sent mail box. He suggests that users BCC themselves on all e-mails that they might wish to save and to then manage these items through the inbox. He is a fan of automating various functions and among his recommendations is that the sent mail box should be automatically emptied after a certain amount of time.
Hurst argues that the most important resource that any worker has is their own attention. Accordingly he suggests that to help avoid information overload the worker should put themselves on media diet. Basically, you must accept that there is only so much time that you have to consume media and that we should focus on those items that provide the most information that you need and filter those of only tangential interest out. Tested items become part of what he calls the “lineup” and he suggests that other items be rotated in for “tryouts” periodically to see if they are better suited to your information needs than any of your existing sources. As a librarian, this is perhaps the hardest part of the book to implement.
Hurst also provides considerable advice on “bit literate” information creation. He suggests ways that you can name and organize various bits of information from reports and your own e-mails to digital photographs and music files in order to make them more accessible and less cluttered. The suggestions here range from standardizing the ways that you name files to choosing the right file format for any given file.
Bit Literacy focuses on organizing the digital information that we each deal with on a daily basis. The principles contained in the book are equally effective in managing our analog information. Simply put, we must use the tools we have for the purposes that they are best suited and we must accept that there is a practical limit to the amount of information we can consume. If like me you have often felt overwhelmed by your inbox, your to-read box, your bedside reading pile, etc., then this book may be a good place to start in your quest for greater productivity.
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