It occurred to me this morning that checking email often may be a feature, not a bug, of information culture.
Productivity people talk all the time about how you have to stop checking email, you have to stop checking Twitter, in order to start doing real work. I’m not sure checking email is the problem. I think improper filters are.
Let me say it another way. Since the invention of the web, the real-time web has been kind of inevitable. So many updates, so fast, mean updates must get shorter, which in turn means they must be updated faster, and so on. Endless cycle, leading to endless updates.
What we really need to be working on right now is proper filtering methods for this always-on web. Because we don’t know for sure what’s really relevant to us, we subscribe via RSS to stuff we generally care about and hope we get good stuff from it, but often, it isn’t interesting enough to subscribe. We are left with a lot of stuff that’s 50% relevant, not urgent, and which often, we’d rather not see.
So the problem is filtering based on mood, free-time, and urgency. These are all non-trivial problems because there are no hard lines between in any of these categories– ie things are not 30% urgent, we don’t always read 100 words per minute, etc. They are themselves subjective and based on circumstance.
What I need is someone exactly like me that knows exactly how I feel at this moment that can tell me what I want to see right now that is pointed in my direction. This can be a human or a robot. But this is practically impossible so we’re left with highly rudimentary filters that are always throwing stuff at us at improper times, as in “I’m having dinner with my girlfriend, is this call I’m receiving more or less important than that?”
So the result of all of this is a constant checking of all these sources– RSS, social networks, email, etc.– which leave us super distracted and prone to getting absolutely fucking nothing done for really long periods of time.
There is no solution to this other than a perfect personal assistant, whether robot or human, that takes in everything you have to look at and judges whether it’s important enough for you to see. Nevermind that some things set off your creativity while others don’t, and those are impossible to know ahead of time.
Somewhere down the line there is a real solution to this, a perfect watchtower, but it involves total dissolution of privacy. Would you be willing to have it– for perfect peace of mind?
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