| I meant to reply to this earlier. This was an interesting snippet, which I've pulled out to put into one of the short powerpoint presentations I'm putting together: "Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically." The phenomenon of interruption in the modern workplace coupled with the wide array of often ill-defined (amorphous) projects that the average "knowledge worker" is responsible for means that the structure of PIMs must 1. Allow people to make iterative progress on tasks. And then help people keep track of that progress. (aka need more than just binary switches like Done and Not Done, Flagged and Not flagged, Filed and Not filed) 2. Be flexible enough respond to unforeseen changes in organizational needs. (aka the whole Hierarchy versus Faceted systems versus Tagging discussion) Which brings us right back to the whole notion of adaptive software. Not adaptive in the sense of AI, but adaptive in the sense that the user is never stuck with the first tool they choose to use on their data. Because chances are, their data will change and the tools they will need to deal with that data will change. So rather than forcing the user to do a lot of copying and pasting of the same information from tool to tool (Mac to PC, Email to Calendar, Categories to Folders), why not make the tools themselves capable of "morphing" to fit the needs of the data. After all, it's the data that we care about, the tools are just a means to an end. (Although in software, we sometimes get a little too enamored of the tools and put them front and center to the bewilderment of our users.) This is true at the highest levels: Being cross-platform, being interoperable, allowing for smooth transferral of data across different application areas. As well as at the lowest level. Allowing users to easily change how they organize their data from Tags to Facets to Collections. The given is that things will always change. So software that's flexible enough to change with you is the crucial difference between whether your PIM can keep up with your data or whether you feel like your Inbox is going to explode. Thanks Brendan. On Oct 16, 2005, at 2:00 AM, Brendan O'Connor wrote: this is a neat article on information overload and user attention with computers. very chandler-esque type problems to solve... |
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