A new standard for personal information management
I had lunch the other day with Adriana Lukas of VRM-London fame. One of the topics that came up – I have no idea how – involved receiving emails… Facebook messages… incoming tweets..
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Erm. Incoming ‘information.’ And we got to discussing how we processed these inputs. In particular, the individual methods we used to filter and sort out the gleam from the dross.
Before I go on, please note, I’m not talking about spam here. We all sort that out to varying effectiveness with our spam filters.
I’m really just referring to the amount of input your average digerati tends to (chooses to) process. It reminded me of how I approached a recent situation. I had to contact someone, rather urgently, as I had forgotten to RSVP for an event that night that I needed prior permission for, which was then two hours away.
I chose to email two of their email accounts and send them a tweet. I did not call them, despite having their phone number.
Let’s dissect that. I saturated their email and primary digital input method (twitter.) I did this because I knew they checked those, and yet at the same time did not feel my lack of initiative justified interrupting them via a demanding attention mechanism.
Ignoring the huge degree of choice and personal preference exercised there – what if I hadn’t known? How did I know this person would check their email or twitter?
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What the information saturated among us are developing are our own personal set of information processing heuristics. Each person approaches this type of thing in different ways, reads different info, and finds different methods of contact socially acceptable at any given time. Worst (best?) – these standards are *all* individual. Without a personal degree of knowledge, something that doesn’t scale over time or quantity, we can’t know the best way to contact people.
So this brings us to the new standard for personal information management. A very… individual standard. How do we know how to contact our (distributed) friends as distance continues along it’s path to zero?
As always… just a point for thought.
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