Tools such as calendar, contacts, and to-do lists are useful, but only for a small portion of what we need to manage.
They capture basic types of information in basic ways – the kinds of things that are easy to describe and simple to manage, the barest of outlines of our information landscape.
They’re designed to do one thing, and hopefully do it well, but leave behind vast swaths of information to be handled by other means.
And what our tools fail to capture falls back on the mind:
– cycling reminders of important tasks, so we don’t forget;
– persistent anxiety warning us of dangers, so that we don’t let something vital fall through the cracks; and
– a burdened working memory trying to keep track of all the pending tasks, at various stages of completion.
There’s a lot more in our information landscape than the low-hanging fruit our tools capture. It is in the uncaptured underbrush that lives the bottom line: success or failure, hidden opportunities, snakes in the grass.
Our tools help track simple things in simple ways, that’s by design. What they don’t do is make life any easier, or simpler, or more pleasant, or less anxious.
That’s not what they’re concerned about.
Design choices that make one tool simpler to build can make managing information as a whole more difficult. What makes sense for one tool doesn’t make sense in the broader landscape.
So, our tools tend to add to the burden, unwittingly, by their design.
An example is the phenomenon of information silos.
