Data hoarding update: what about “knowing 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.