And so, we come back to email.
Email doesn’t just fragment information across messages. Within each message, information is buried in a heap, in a wall of text.
There is a fundamental problem with any text-based tool being used as a repository of information. Whether the email inbox, note-taking apps, or conventional word processors, tools that are based on long-form text tend to bury information in heaps of text.
Managing information is not the same thing as communication.
Long-form text, narrative, and story telling are effective ways of communicating ideas. But, they’re not the only way, nor the best way, to organize information.
When information is organized, ideas are accessible – immediately, on a whim. It’s like knowing something in your head: you know what you know and can access it on command, even as you think through unrelated problems.
But a wall of text does not present ideas in accessible form.
A heap of text is a mystery: you know you have a pile there, but cannot be sure what’s in it. To illuminate its contours you have to read it, and build a structure of its ideas, in the mind.
Reading breathes life into the ideas, and raises them out of the heap of text. But the moment is fleeting: the ideas float in the mind while memory – working memory – breaths life into them. And when the mind turns to something else, the representations fade in seconds, and we’re left with the heap of words, once again.
A wall of text, a heap of words, is a well of potential – of opportunities and dangers. It rings with uncertainty, and sends upwards waves of anxiety rising into our consciousness, to compel us into action.
To put the mind at ease, we have to shine light on the heap of words, and breathe life into it, again. And hold on to the ideas, for a moment or two, before letting them go, as we again tend to more pressing needs.
That’s a lot of repeated effort to quench our anxiety for a moment, and then forget again. It’s a never-ending cycle: uncertainty and anxiety, reading and forgetting.
Long-form text is fine for communicating ideas.
For everything else, there’s a better way.
