Tools such as contacts, calendar, and to-do lists, capture basic types of information in basic ways. What little they capture, they segregate by type, into information silos.
It’s like keeping track of your books in various files: one for titles, one for cover art, one for author names, one for page count. The information about each book is scattered across various collections, but the content, story, ideas – the meat of the book – is nowhere to be found. To reconstruct the book in the mind, you’d have to scan several files. And even then, what you have is an outline of the cover, and not the ideas.
And so it is with contacts, calendar, and to-do lists. Contacts don’t capture relationships, dates in a calendar don’t tell the story, to-do lists do not model the task at hand.
What you put into each collection remains there in isolation. To rediscover and reconstruct your information, you’ll have to look in different places – many more than ever before.
Our tools bring together some information, and in so doing, scatter information in many more ways.
What is left is a growing collection of information artifacts – files, collections, databases – left over by our tools and practices. These add to the clutter and clog our systems – our digital and cognitive systems, and our lives.
That’s because these tools carve out only the easy parts, from the body of information. They don’t keep related information together.
But there’s another tool that’s built for the right reasons,
but is often put to uses for which it wasn’t intended.
And that is email.
