What? You don’t think that’s a radical change? Stop and think for a moment what inverting the sort order would do to an average inbox — yours, for example.

Queue don’t stack

First, it would surface all those ancient messages from years ago when you first joined the company. They’d suddenly be at the top of your list, getting in your way when you tried to do just about anything with your email. These ancient relics had settled to the bottom of your inbox like sediment in the ocean, to be slowly compacted by layers of email above.

Flipping the sort order will surface that old gunk. Much of that material you can simply delete because it’s no longer relevant. If you do find a few interesting fossils, move them to a folder for reference later. Getting rid of all that deadweight will be a relief.

Second, having the oldest stuff on top blocks your view of the recent and far more valuable work you’re doing now. If you’re a fan of Inbox Zero, this acts as a forcing function. It helps ensure that you’ve always got your deck cleared for action.

Every time you find yourself scrolling down to the new stuff, you’ll be reminded of the backlog that’s piling up. You’ll simply have to get those old messages out of the way so that you can handle the new stuff coming in.

Third, you won’t be letting your attention get hijacked by the latest items. Those new messages in large bold font can be so tempting, but you can’t get to them without ignoring the stuff you currently have at the top of your list. Letting those new messages jump the queue will become a conscious decision, not an involuntary reflex.

Maybe it's time for us to make new email messages wait their turn: First in, first out.

If you use your inbox as a glorified task list — as most of us do, sadly — putting those older items at the top is a great way to ensure that those things don’t get lost in the shuffle. And once you’re done with those items, you can delete them or move them into a folder out of the way, bringing the next item that needs your attention to the top of the list.

Fourth, it dis-empowers the nags and micro-managers in your organization. They rely on the fact that new messages will take priority over existing stuff. They’ve learned that bombarding coworkers with “Is it done yet?” messages is the best way to annoy people into doing things. Sorting new messages to the bottom drowns out all that noise. You can deal with things in the order you received them.

Fifth, it might help minimize the constant pressure of new things being added to your pile of work. There’s nothing more dispiriting than watching a stream of new messages fill the top of your inbox while you’re working on a time-consuming task. Having those messages appear at the bottom of your list might help reduce the sense of panic you get from falling behind.

Try this one at home

…And those are just a few of the effects I can think of off the top of my head.

Can you think of other effects changing the default inbox sort order might have? Is it an experiment you’re willing to try yourself? Have you tired it in the past? Let me know in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. What I learned when I stopped using email folders

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making

Do we really know how good decisions get made? Gary Klein’s Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making takes aim at commonly held beliefs about the best way to make decisions. Do any of these claims sound familiar to you?

• Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skilfully
• Decision biases distort our thinking
• We can reduce uncertainty by gathering more information
• To make a decision, gather options and then compare them to find the best one
• It is essential to have a clear goal when beginning a project
• Our plans have a better chance of succeeding if we identify the biggest risks and find ways to eliminate them

They certainly struck a chord with me. I found myself agreeing more or less to all of the ten or eleven claims that Klein lists in the first chapter of his book. Apparently most of us do — Klein surveyed more than 160 people to compile his list of received wisdom about decision making. All of the claims sound perfectly reasonable. But as Klein points out through numerous case studies, interviews and examples, the situations most decision makers face in real-world conditions are unreasonable.

Which is why what sounds like a bunch of unobjectionable statements from a first-year course in business administration can get us into such trouble when we leave the controlled world of the the classroom or psychology lab.

Poking holes

Klein deliberately doesn’t call these statements myths. All of the claims provide useful guidance in specific — and usually quite controlled — situations. But they are not the universal truths that decision scientists, behavioral psychologists, and business gurus often make them out to be.

Take the claim that “decision biases distort our thinking”. (There have been a lot of books written about this subject lately. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational is one of the best.) You can devise all sorts of clever experiments to demonstrate that human beings do have ingrained biases that affect our thinking. But do these biases cause trouble for us in real world settings? Klein argues that many human biases can also be viewed as sensible defaults.

For example, one of the key experiments used to demonstrate “irrationality” is a game where two players divide a pot of money. They players are anonymous, and do not meet each other. One player is asked to divide the pot any way he likes and make an offer to the other player. That player can decide to accept the deal or refuse it. If the second player accepts, both players get to keep the money. If the second player refuses, neither player gets money.

The rational thing for the first player to do is to offer the second one the smallest amount possible, a dollar. The second player, also being rational, ought to accept that deal since it’s better to get a dollar than to get nothing at all. In practice, most people in the second player’s shoes routinely reject stingy offers and more people in the first player’s choose usually offer something close to a 50-50 split. Certainly some sort of bias is at work here; why would two people who have never met and are unlikely to ever meet cooperate in such a fashion?

Klein points out that in real world conditions, away from the psych lab, you never know when you’ll bump into somebody. Or that you’ll share a mutual acquaintance who likes to gossip. And even though the experimenter has assured the players that their identities will remain strictly confidential, can the players really trust him? Maybe not. In conditions of uncertainty, it makes sense to play it safe and offer something fair. Better to guard your reputation than to be thought of as a cheat or a jerk. Word gets around, you know.

This may be a bias, Klein says, but it’s a useful one. In most situations, it would cause us to behave in our best interest anyway. Maybe our gut instincts are trying to tell us something.

The analogy Klein uses is vision. Our eyes are amazingly sensitive organs, and our brains carry out amazing feats of information processing to make sense of the massive visual input it receives every second. To keep up with all the data, our optical system follows some rules of thumb that allow it to make shortcuts. Most of the time, this works just fine, but it is possible to “fake out” our brains with a cleverly designed optical illusion. But it’s rare that you encounter these optical illusions in the wild. It’s the exception, not the rule.

Another example is the claim that gathering information can help reduce uncertainty. (As an information junkie myself, I strongly agreed with this claim at the start of the book. But I’ve since changed my mind.) Klein points out that in situations with a low signal to noise ratio, when accurate and relevant information is hard to find, spending more time gathering information also means more time gathering distractions. Those distractions can slow you down or cause you to focus on the wrong things. Rather than spending time gathering more data, you’d be better off trying to make sense of what little trustworthy information you have.

In other words, if your problem is information overload, gathering more information isn’t going to help!

Most of Streetlights and Shadows is devoted to a discussion of each claim, why it gets made, when and where it gets misapplied, and what we can do about it. For each, Klein proposes a more nuanced replacement. So “establish clear goals at the start of any project” becomes “when facing difficult problems, we must refine our goals as we try to reach them.”

His new phrases don’t have the unambiguous certainty of the sound bites they replace, but that’s the point. Using rigorous analytical methods canhelp us in well-ordered situations. But we often can’t arrive at definitive answers in our unstructured world. We have to rely on our experience and expertise instead.

Puzzles and mysteries

I especially liked the contrast Gary Klein drew between puzzles and mysteries. With a puzzle, you know what the solution looks like and can recognize its pieces, even when you’re not quite sure how to put it all together. It has set rules that don’t change.

With mysteries, you’re often not sure what “solved” looks like. It’s tricky to identify relevant clues, and difficult to see how they fit together. You face ambiguous or conflicting information. And there’s often a twist to it — a bit of context that can put the whole situation in a new light.

Once you know the trick, it’s fairly easy to solve a puzzle. They have clear rules. You can develop a process for solving similar puzzles of the same kind.

Mysteries are open-ended, and each one is different. You can develop expertise in solving mysteries, but you can’t really create a routine or checklist for doing it.

The claims Klein discusses in Streetlights and Shadows work well for puzzles, but not for mysteries. Knowing which kind of problem you have can help you pick an effective decision making strategy. Do we need to drill people on a procedure checklist or do we need to help them explore and develop expertise?

Given that most of the puzzle-solving problems can be solved with rational, analytical methods, and are thus suitable for automation, Klein would argue that most knowledge work today is of the mystery-solving kind, and only becoming more so as our computers become more capable.

Which means that the ten claims he dissects, while true and useful in some situations, aren’t nearly as relevant as they once were. So it’s important that we learn to see past them and embrace other ways of solving difficult issues.

But what are these other ways?

In defense of expertise

The title Streetlights and Shadows comes from an old joke.

A policeman sees a drunk staring at the ground beneath a streetlight. “What are you doing?” the cop asks.

“Looking for my keys.” says the drunk. “I dropped them in the dark alley over there.”

“Then why are you over here?” asks the policeman, confused.

“Because the light’s so much better over here.”

So far, Klein says, we’ve been searching for the keys to adaptive decision making under streetlights: in classrooms, labs, and other controlled environments with clear metrics and fixed timetables. But real-world situations aren’t structured like this. As a result, most of what we’re taught about how to make tough choices falls apart in real-world situations. In the ambiguous, dynamic, and shadowy situations we often find ourselves, basing our actions on these conventional claims about decision making can be useless — or even dangerous.

Where we ought to look instead is out in the field, in practice, with all the messiness that that entails.

In a way, Streetlights and Shadows can be read as a defense of human expertise, a contrast to proponents of big-data computation, machine control, or The Wisdom of Crowds. In some domains, tacit knowledge gained over a lifetime of experience outperforms most of the rigorous, analytical methods that have been developed so far.

And on some level, we recognize that. Though Gary Klein found that most people agreed with the ten or eleven claims set forth in the book, he found that few of his respondents regularly practiced them. They did not routinely make risk management plans, correct for human biases, or wait until all the evidence had been collected. We may use these analytical tools to justify our decisions, but they’re more often taken at the gut.

No related posts.

Are email folders obsolete? Or are they still useful in the age of search engines?

Gmail’s search features were fast and accurate, certainly far better than anything than the competition had at the time. But was that enough? Could search alone really do everything a business user needed? I doubted it, but I wasn’t in a position to test it at the time.

After I co-founded Infovark, I could put that claim to the test. We signed up for Google Apps in 2008 and I decided to forgo using folders and rely only on search. (Gmail calls its organization scheme “labels” but they serve the same function as folders.)

My experiment lasted almost three years. Here’s what I discovered.

Conversation View

Conversation view is easily the most popular feature of Gmail. It’s now been adopted by most other email applications. Conversation view automatically groups messages by subject, so it can sometimes fill the void left by abandoning folders. But the reliance on the subject heading can cause trouble if:

1. You have coworkers that tinker with the subject lines of their messages, breaking a conversation into several smaller, disjointed threads.
2. You have coworkers that hijack or resurrect old email conversations because they’re too lazy to start a new message chain.
3. Since conversations drift over time, the collapsed conversation view might have a subject heading that is increasingly irrelevant to the topic being discussed. This can make it much harder to figure out what’s going on unless you read the entire chain. And it makes searching for a particularly important email buried in the middle of a long conversation quite difficult.

None of these things detract from the usefulness of Conversation View itself. After all, most of the time, it does exactly what you want: highlight a chain of messages and make it easy to see the start and end of a thread while avoiding all the junk in the middle.

But it doesn’t quite replace a folder or a label because email subjects are often too granular a way of looking at messages. Sometimes I want a higher-level grouping, to consolidate multiple conversations into the same mental bucket.

I also discovered that I didn’t like to be at the mercy of my fellow collaborators. If they changed the subject line or changed the topic of the thread, I’d have no good way of assigning a message to the right bucket on my side. It works well enough when you have a small team with similar email habits, but all it takes is one or two folks to throw your inbox into disarray.

Living in the moment

Without folders there’s no easy way to pull messages out of the stream of email into a separate area. This has the effect of highlighting the importance of “now” in conversations. Normally, this wasn’t a big deal for me in our small company because the volume of email is generally pretty low.

But when things get busy, I found myself scrolling up and down, moving between pages to find the last few conversations on a particular subject. I noticed it particularly when I got back from business trips or vacations, when I really wanted to sort messages into piles and deal with all the marketing or finance messages in a batch, rather than address each one by one.

It also meant that we would ask each other for status updates more often, even when nothing interesting had happened. What folks were really asking for was a message to get moved to the top of their inbox so that they could keep the issue top of mind. It was easier to ask for an update than to try a dig through the messages from last Wednesday.

The end of history

What really spelled the end of my “search only” experiment was trying to dig up the contracts for our Dell computer leases. (Hence the three years from the start of my experiment.) There were several email conversations where we discussed the specs of the equipment, provided financial documents, arranged for shipping, etc.

I knew roughly when these conversations occurred, but had no idea exactly which words to type into the search box to get the messages I wanted. I could guess that “Dell” and “laptop” and “lease” might bring me results, but what if we hadn’t used those exact words? Or what if those words hadn’t ranked very highly in a chain of messages where we’d talked about computer purchases?

Even if I’d been consistent about using the right terms that would allow me to search and retrieve these messages, what about the folks I was talking to? What if the developers talked about their “machines” or “rigs” or the sales reps used the term “financing options”?

As with subject lines, I was at the mercy of the folks I was corresponding with. If they’d written good, descriptive messages with clear subjects and common terms I’d have no trouble retrieving the emails I needed. But if they hadn’t, I was stuck.

Since I needed to renew my lease and make a few equipment changes, I really needed to see all the stuff from our previous lease. And through search alone, there was no way for me to be sure that I was getting it all.

Conclusion

After that experience, I started using Google’s labels to group and organize messages, much like I’d used folders in Outlook to do the same. Having that extra bit of context around my email conversations makes all the difference in the world when it comes to keeping track of particular topics.

I admit that it took me roughly three years (at a very small company without much email traffic) before the pain got so great I had to put an end to my experiment. And that’s why I think that many people believe you can get away with search alone: If you’re dealing with small volumes of information, without much history, and have little need to consider the broader context, you can get by without organizing things.

But that situation is the exception, not the rule. Unless you’ve recently started a new job, purchased a new computer, or set up a new company email system, you’ll likely find that none of those conditions hold. It might take a few months or a few years, but you’ll eventually feel the pinch like I did.

When I finally decided I’d had enough, sorting all my messages into buckets was really painful. And I think a lot of people fall into that trap — they’ve avoided organizing their work for so long, believing those who tell them it isn’t necessary — that when they do feel the need to get organized, it becomes this huge, monstrous task. So they suffer with a system that they’ve outgrown.

“Outgrown” is the operative word here. You can get by with search alone at the start, but if that’s your only strategy for locating what you need, you’ll eventually reach the limits of what it can do. There is no silver bullet when it comes to keeping up with your stuff.

A final note about Gmail and Google Apps

Google has done a lot to entrench the idea that search is the best way to get the information you need. Their Gmail marketing page touts “no more folders, filing, or fumbling” as the number one benefit. Yet folks at Google must know that search alone doesn’t cut it.

Several years ago, they introduced labels, a concept similar to tagging. In May 2011 they added the ability to “nest” labels inside each other, which now makes them capable of mirroring the classic folders-in-folders structure familiar to Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users everywhere. And when I opened my Gmail earlier today, I was greeted with no fewer than five different ways to organize my inbox.

Inbox, inbox, how do I organize thee? Let me count the ways...

When the biggest and best search company on the planet spends considerable engineering effort to sort and categorize your inbox more effectively, it’s a pretty good hint that search alone as a strategy can take you only so far. Beyond that, you’ll need more than one tool in your toolbox — or inbox.

Related posts:

1. How to name your files, folders and email
2. Locating Stuff: Folders vs. Search
3. Infovark Templates: Email

The latest round began on the AIIM website. I’ll list links to the key blog posts in the debate at the bottom of this article for those who are curious. It’s a lively discussion, as is typical on the Internet when there are strongly held opinions and no clear answer.

Horses for courses

The debate rages on, but are we gathered around the right campfire?

But the debate is largely irrelevant. Most users of content management systems don’t care how they get the information they need, so long as they can get it quickly and easily. If folders get the job done, they use folders. If tags do the trick, they use tags. If search yields good results, they use search.

You can see this at work on the Internet. While search engines like Google are the primary way users get to the sites they need, a lot of folks use browser favorites or social bookmarking sites like Delicious. And once you arrive at the site you want, you’ll usually see some sort of structured, folder-like navigation to get you to the pages you’re interested in. Most folks think nothing of combining these different approaches to locating information within a single browsing session.

So why is the debate about folders versus search so contentious? Among players in the information management industry, it’s a big deal because vendors have to decide where to spend their software development dollars. They have to set priorities, which means placing tagging over search over folders in their work queue, for example. Even if your system of choice has decent implementations of these three different mechanisms, the folks implementing the solution will likely pick one approach to focus on.

As a user of these systems, you have to hope that they picked the right one, whether out of blind faith or careful analysis, or that they spent the considerable engineering or design effort to tackle all three methods at once.

Here at Infovark, we’ve felt this problem acutely. We opted for the “all of the above” approach because we feel that the more ways you have to find a piece of information, the more likely it is to get found. As a result, we’ve spent more time on getting the information architecture right than on anything else. And it shows: Our interface is plain, the documentation is sparse, and… well, you get the idea.

But beyond the investment in maintaining multiple search mechanisms, you’ve got to help people know which one to use when, because each has its strengths. It’s not that one of these approaches is better than another, it’s about which one is more appropriate in a given situation. And that means understanding the context in which the application or website gets used.

You can’t make an informed choice about search versus folders until you know how the business operates and how people get their work done. And the answer may very well be that both are needed.

Like a lot of abstract debates, this one can’t have a clear winner. And that’s a good thing, because different teams will come up with different approaches. It makes it more likely that you’ll find a tool that will work for your particular situation. Is a search engine better than organizing by folders? It depends. You won’t know until you try it yourself and see.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled flame war

OK, here’s that chain of blog posts I promised earlier. The debate rages on. Check them out and go add some fuel to the fire:

1. Why Folders are the New F Word
2. The Truth About Folders
3. The Truth About Folders: A Rebuttal
4. Folders: A Nutritious Part of Your Content Management Diet
5. Folders Aren’t Born Bad

Related posts:

1. What I learned when I stopped using email folders
2. How to name your files, folders and email
3. Ending the Paper Shuffle: Locating Documents

The Shallows is a more thoughtful version of his provocative earlier article in The Atlantic called Is Google Making us Stupid? But both make the same point: the widespread adoption of new information technology is changing not only the way we live and work, but also how we think.

The Shallows by Nick Carr

At first, this doesn’t seem like a controversial claim. The tools we use shape how we interact with the world and influence our view of it. Distances that seem impossibly far away on foot seem trivial with a car or airplane. The spread of cheap artificial lighting has changed the way we perceive the day and night. But the Shallows makes a bolder claim: That use of these tools does more than influence our thoughts and actions — it physically rewires our brains so that we think and behave differently.

The author discusses several recent studies that show that people using web search engines, feed readers, real-time streams, text messaging, and other modern technologies gather and process information in fundamentally different ways than people relying on more traditional sources. They skim and surf across a sea of different media and source materials, accumulating a broad but shallow knowledge of many diverse topics. They become somewhat better at multitasking and switching contexts but less able to concentrate on tasks requiring deep thought. Is this a good thing?

Testing the waters

We tend to assume that technology and progress go hand-in-hand, and that greater access to information will lead to better outcomes and higher productivity. We’ve been putting computers in schools, wiring classrooms to the Internet, boosting e-books and e-reader technology, and rewriting the rules for media and journalism. All this technology is fundamentally reshaping the way we find and share information.

Though Nick Carr is a tech enthusiast and information junkie himself, he’s skeptical that we’re really doing ourselves any favors by enthusiastically jumping in with both feet. But he’s careful not to condemn these new tools, either.

Some of my favorite parts of The Shallows discuss how some previous information technologies also had a dramatic effect on the way people lived, worked, and thought. Many of these earlier innovations were also regarded skeptically or actively resisted.

For example, Socrates thought that the written word would mean the end of rational argument. And the printing press was initially banned outright in many countries. It can take a long time for society to come to grips with changes in information technology, and we’re just beginning the Internet age.

But while previous generations moaned about the sheer volume of printed works or recorded music, the amount of information available to us today is enormous and growing exponentially. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the massive warehouses of data at our disposal, or feel lost or adrift in a sea of random bits. Even though we’ve faced technological revolutions before, the scale of this one is unprecedented.

Carefully wade in

Having had a year to think about the issues Nick Carr raised in The Shallows, I think he’s absolutely right to point out some of the potential pitfalls of these new technologies. But we still don’t know enough to judge whether on balance they will improve society or diminish it. And we’ll likely find ways to mitigate some of the less desirable consequences.

There’s a great historical anecdote in The Shallows that talks about how one monk in the Middle Ages eventually hit upon the trick of reading silently. Not only could he read more quickly, but he could also read more often because he wouldn’t disturb anyone. While some thought him odd, the innovation slowly began to spread across Europe. We’ll likely discover similar tricks to improve the usefulness of these new tools and minimize their annoyances.

Whether you’re a skeptic of Internet culture or an enthusiast, and regardless of whether you read it in old-fashioned print or indulge in the irony of reading it on your Kindle, The Shallows will make you think about when, how and why you use these new tools.

And that is definitely a good thing.

Related posts:

1. Review: Here Comes Everybody
2. Review: Keeping Found Things Found
3. Review: Making Things Happen