Not all of us are looking to key our way out of this box. We are now witnessing the emergence of a non-technological response to the symptoms of an accelerated info-culture. In San Francisco, a writer and consultant named Merlin Mann runs a blog called 43 Folders, which is about “personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better.” The popular site has become a focal point of debate about ways to manage the downside of too much digital communication, but from the perspective of users rather than technophobes.
The name of Mann’s blog comes from an idea in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, the bestselling 2001 time-management guide by David Allen, who has become a guiding light for people in BlackBerry twelve-step recovery programs. A hippie in dress pants, Allen is an Ojai, California-based consultant who was an educator and jack of all trades until the mid-1980s, when he set himself up as a productivity consultant. Getting Things Done — in the sturdy tradition of American marketing, he has trademarked the phrase and the acronym gtd — offers a smorgasbord of ideas about how to take back your life using a mixture of common sense, mind-clearing techniques, and self-discipline.
He’s big on creating paper to-do lists and eliminating the minor sources of frustration that pollute the typical workday. The forty-three folders idea involves setting up a system of forty-three ordinary manila folders in one’s office — one for each day of the month, and another dozen for the months — in which you place reminders of tasks that need to be completed and when. One of Allen’s premises is that much of the stress associated with an information- saturated workplace is that we end up over-committing ourselves without quite knowing how much we’re on the hook for. You have a vague sense of emails that have gone unanswered and interrupted projects dangling in digital limbo, going nowhere but nonetheless giving you grief.
By taking up the ideas in gtd, he contends, one can compile “a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way [in which] you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles, and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment.” One of Allen’s most popular ideas is the “Hipster pda” — a little notebook or a sheath of index cards, which you keep on your person so you can make notations as they come to you, rather than committing them to some digital black hole or, worse, forgetting these fleeting thoughts as other sources of distraction muscle their way into your consciousness. It doesn’t get any more low-tech than that.
The growing interest in such “solutions” — to borrow a favourite techie buzzword — indicates the way portable information technologies have unwittingly created new problems while solving old ones. The BlackBerry that doesn’t stop pinging, the tsunami of email, the relentless subdividing and cross-posting of online data — these features of our daily information diet hint that something’s gone awry. If we are to establish balance in our relationship with the digital information that envelops us, we must reconsider our understanding of the inner workings of our pre-existing mental machinery and the limits of its capacity to adapt to the electronic environment.
One approach is to recognize the futility of the compulsion to inundate ourselves with information in the hope of meaningfully processing everything that comes over the digital transom. Kathy Sierra says one of the most widely read and copied posts on her blog was a cri de coeur in which she confessed that she had stopped trying to keep up with all the technical reading she was supposed to be doing. The post brought an enormous sigh of relief in response from thousands of distracted bloggers who, she says, were grateful to be released from that treadmill of surfing, reading, forgetting, repeating.
The chronic memory loss prompted by such online behaviour is, in fact, the canary in the coal mine. Our information technologies have created an epidemic of engineered forgetfulness — a symptom of the massive quantity of data we attempt to cram into our minds each day. We inevitably fail, yet our social biases about forgetting are thoroughly negative. A great memory is still considered to be a sign of mental acuity while we associate forgetfulness with aging and decline. But, as Sierra points out, a healthy brain actively rejects much of the information we’re trying to stuff into it; the brain is designed to be selective. “There’s a lot of chemistry in the brain devoted to stopping us from remembering things,” she told me. “That means forgetting is pretty darn important. We feel guilty about it. But we should have a great deal of respect for that [mechanism].” Discarding information that is not urgent or relevant is crucial to our ability to think in ways that are efficient and creative.
The point is that we must acknowledge the self-inflicted memory lapses triggered by information overload, chronic interruptions, and relentless electronic multi-tasking. The need to be much more conscious of our information diet, in turn, is a reflection of the imbalance between our technical capacity to record information digitally and our neural capacity to remember it chemically. After fifteen years of web access, we haven’t really tried to reconcile these unevenly matched features of our mental geography. Moreover, amid all the transformations, we have been devaluing those very neurological capabilities that technology has not been able to mimic, and none more thoroughly than the biological need to concentrate as a way of allowing longterm memory to transform into thought and, when necessary, action.
As a consequence, our perennially distracted Net culture seems programmed to eliminate time for thinking, which is not the same thing as time for finding and saving data. We have unleashed an explosion of digital media but, paradoxically, we have less and less opportunity to digest it, and then to allow all the information to, well, inform. Being online has become a state of being, while going off-line increasingly represents either an act of will or a tiny gesture of rebellion against the status quo. “We’re at a point when we can’t be alone,” Wilfrid Laurier psychology professor Jeffery Jones told me as we talked about his research on technology and interruptions. We were sitting in his small office: the husk of an old computer sat on the floor, and there was a new wide-screen terminal on his desk, along with a joystick and his cellphone. Toward the end of the interview, someone knocked, but he ignored it. He said he now knows that if he wants to focus, he must make a point of not picking up the phone or answering his email — even though that failure to connect leaves him feeling vaguely guilty. “But I’ve learned,” Jones reflected, “that you have to have some time when you are unavailable.”
