Information Channels and Filters: Tools to Protect Our Attention - DBR 030

Do Busy Right

David Allen on Information Overload - if it were real, then when you walked into a library, your head would explode. Let's consider that idea in the context of Attention Overload. When we feel overloaded and overwhelmed, we can't just blame that on the increasing amount of information. It's true that the amount of information has been increasing for about 500 years, maybe even longer. It's not really a problem of the increasing amount of information, as much as it is the fact that we have not built the appropriate filters for all of our information channels. And when we look at information, my mind immediately goes to our attention. Information channels

• An information channel is any source of information
• I’ll not try to define information – for now, we know it when we see it.
• Some channels are better, some are worse.
• The social media contract – recent innovation?

Information and attention

• Information needs our attention to be useful.
• Information itself doesn’t actually usually call out to us Some alerts carry (very) limited information - more on that later.
• Information and our attention are pretty tightly linked.

Information channels and filters

• Defining information channels What is an information channel?
• Where did our filters come from?
• How to use filters - Clay Shirky

Information channels and alerts

• We’ve had alerts from the beginning of computing.
• Alerts have limited bandwidth, so don’t deliver much information (although a little might be really important).
• We integrated alerts into our technology Modern devices – “you’ve got mail’.
• Without alerts, we had to be intentional about gathering new information and attending to information.
• We signed up for this ‘self-alerting’ information – social contract part 2.

Confusing filters and alerts

• Curiosity results in proactive search of information channels.
• There are nuanced ways to manage alerts in information channels.

Forces driving our use of alerts

• Some different forces toward “alerting information” – curiosity, FOMO, social agreements.
• Debates around who owns the phone / unlisted numbers.
• Alerting information channels.
• we perhaps sacrifice the use of filters for our own ‘convenience’.
• Our responsibility to utilize the tools – our attention is valuable.

Is your attention ‘wide-open’? Too many alerts, too many channels

• You may be leaving your attention wide open This has a cost, or at least a risk.
• We are willing victims in some ways – at a minimum, we open ourselves up to attention we don’t want.
• But we have tools to deflect that.
• The decision is a statistics problem – how valuable and how often is that channel?

Maintain your filters

• We need to be ruthless about filtering.
• Our attention filters need maintenance – be proactive.
• Human communication is pretty fault tolerant.

Using the idea of filters for our information channels can help us fight against the overwhelming notion of information (and, thus, attention) overload. Filters are a technology we can use to manage the amount of information that needs our attention. But we have to be proactive and remember to maintain our filter systems.