data hoarding

Data hoarding update: what about “knowing stuff”?

by Jason on October 13, 2011 · 0 comments

Layla knows stuff

So the other day @benlucier tweeted “Do you organize email by folders? An IBM study says you’re wasting your time: http://bvl.co/az” [PDF] and I found myself in the middle of a “wait for a thing to happen on my computer” cycle, so I gave way to temptation.

After all, I’m still one of those holdouts who uses a mail program instead of Gmail, and I do use folders to some extent, though thanks to OS X’s Spotlight capabilities, I rarely dig through them. (Also: IMAP.) Was it time to cut the cord fully and just archive stuff into one giant bucket?

It turns out the people in the survey don’t seem to use mail like I do, creating a new folder, on average, every 5 days, and using them in part to get their inbox of todo items under control.  I very rarely make new folders, use about 7 of them 95% of the time, and I don’t use my inbox or my email program as a todo list.

So after all that reading and trying to understand statistics, my life went unchanged, yet validated in some way, though I may have brought that part into the equation myself.

Was the time spent reading that paper worthwhile, or was it just another symptom of obsessing over data; basically data hoarding for the mind?  I’ve stopped consuming a lot of news this year, partly because it’s counterproductive and paints a different picture of the world than the one I choose to see, but also because there are sometimes mistakes and it bugs me.  Is digging beyond a headline in a tweet to read the source material just another manifestation of that?

Looking at it another way, would choosing to simply believe the headline given me validation in another direction, providing a manufactured truth to push me in a direction that, it turns out, wouldn’t have mattered much, given my current email storage habits?

At the moment, my life is set up where there are blocks of time where I can’t really accomplish anything of measure, but I can dip briefly into reading like this, so I don’t see the harm.  That said, if I can manage to restructure that available time, there’s a growing “does that really matter?” category of information that I’m less likely to miss.  Sometimes it’s OK to just keep Google as an outboard brain.

Curing data hoarding: an update

by Jason on October 3, 2011 · 2 comments

rehab

It’s been a month since I recognized that I was a hard code data hoarder, so here’s a quick update on some tricks I’ve developed to cure my data hoarding “condition”:

Flipboard is a fantastic iPad app that lets you consume your Google Reader stuff along with curated content and social media feeds in a magazine-like format that puts the articles on a page in a really attractive layout that also lets you get the gist of most of them without having to click (tap) through.

This has tamed my Google Reader obsession in a few ways (to be clear, I’m still using Reader, but as a data store, not as an interface.)  For starters, there’s no unread count staring at me.  The summaries I mentioned earlier make it easier to just scan the intro to each story without feeling the urge to skim the whole thing.

And finally, a surprise I didn’t think I was able to handle: I now read new stuff first.  In the past I’d start way back at the beginning so I wouldn’t miss the context of updates to evolving stories.  This was seriously holding me back, because I couldn’t read the “news” without starting where I left off, when the most valuable, gotta act now stuff is at the other end of the pipe.  It turns out I’m pretty good at deducing what’s new from the latest stuff.  Huh.

For Twitter data hoarding, three techniques have been helping. My original plan to follow more users to overwhelm the stream is kind of working, but to be honest I haven’t built that list up very much, because I’ve been spending less time on Twitter as a whole (I’ve been tempted to try one of those autofollow automation systems, but it still feels weird to me.)

Spending less time on Twitter is mostly a result of being really really busy, which requires focus, which requires less attention to the social streams outside of allocated times.  Now I know I only have 10 minutes to spare out of a given chunk of time, so I tend to just read what’s happened in the past hour or so, and interact from there.

Lastly, I’ve started using HootSuite for scheduled tweets, so I can batch-submit my non-conversational “timeless gems” and spread them out over a few days.  This lets me spend my active time on Twitter in a more conversational mode, and removes the danger of ducking in to post something and getting sucked into reading everything that’s happened since I last checked (my HootSuite dashboard doesn’t show a stream, just an input box.)

And in the other area of data hoarding where I download everything compulsively to read, listen to or watch later, the solution got pretty simple: my hard disk got full.  Adding scarcity to the equation has forced me to think a little more before I grab things for “later,” so I think I’ll hold off on hardware upgrades for a little while longer.

Photo by tedmurphy