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.

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

Ideally, we’d like to bring this project information together into the same place so that we could reference it and work on it as a unit. There’s a few big benefits to working this way:

1. You know where everything belongs, so you don’t have to wonder or worry about where to put something so you can find it again.
2. You spend less time hunting for related and relevant information.
3. You stay focused on one project, avoiding distractions.

In the good ol’ days, when everything was written on paper, it was pretty easy to collect project materials together.

Tape, paper clips, staples, folders: the simple technologies that used to keep our projects organized

But sadly, most software applications keep information segregated from each other, forcing us to flip between multiple tools and websites to get a clear picture of what’s going on. It’s difficult to maintain a unified project context so long as our email and files are separated by the Great Divide, but there are some tricks we can use to simulate a combined view of your information.

Though I’ll show examples from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Outlook, you should be able to generalize these tips to the office applications you use regularly. Most of them work in similar ways.

Files and email

Fortunately, both your email system and your file system make use of folders to organize information. We can use that to simulate a combined view of your files and email. It’s a simple trick I learned from looking over the shoulders of coworkers and clients as they did their work. I noticed some people moved information around a lot faster, and spent much less time hunting for the things they needed. Here’s how they did it.

First, create a folder in your email for each of your projects, if you don’t have one already. Second, in your Documents folder, create a folder for each of your projects if you don’t have one already.

Make sure that the project names match exactly, including using the same lower or uppercase letters. We want the names to match so that we can recognize our projects at a glance, without actually needing to scan the names to find the one we want. We also want the names to match so that they sort alphabetically into the same position. This allows us to use both our visual and spatial memory to find the project we need, rather than having to read the labels.

Ah, but you’ve already run into a snag, haven’t you? There are folders in your email already. Some of them, like “Personal” and “Travel” don’t map to specific projects. You have a similar problem in your Documents folder, where some annoying programs have decided to dump their files into your work space. This means you can’t easily line up items in your email inbox and your file system.

Getting your projects named and sorted consistently in your files and email is a harder task than it seems at first, but it's worth the effort

There are two ways to solve this problem:

1. Mirror the folder structure exactly, even if it means you have empty placeholder folders.
2. Put your projects in a subfolder named Projects in both your inbox and documents. It’s an extra click to drill down, but you get a clean separation.

Most likely, you’ll have to use a mix of both approaches to get your project folders to line up properly. It’s a hassle to set up at first, but once you’ve done it, you’ll notice how much simpler and quicker some basic tasks become.

For example, when a project email comes in, you can put it in your project folder in your inbox. And you know exactly where it’s file attachment should go — into the project folder with the same name in your documents area. Likewise, if you can’t find a file in your documents, you’ll know right where to look for it in your inbox — it’ll be attached to an email in the project folder with the same name.

Neat, huh? But we’re not done yet.

Tasks, contacts, and appointments

Outlook keeps all your calendar events in one big bucket. This is useful when you want to see your master schedule, but what if you want to figure out how much time is being consumed by a particular project?

And how can we group our tasks by project, and associate particular contacts with particular projects?

Outlook's Categories feature is a hidden gem.

Outlook used to support putting each of these items into folders, just like email. But it wasn’t obvious how to do it in older versions of Outlook, and in Outlook 2010 the feature has all but vanished from the user interface. But there’s another way to establish a project context for contacts, tasks and appointments. We can use categories.

Categories are a very useful feature in Outlook, but few people take advantage of it. You can apply a category to any item, including email. Categories can have both a name and a color, and in the case of your Projects, you should make sure that they have both. The color will help you identify at a glance which items belong to which project when you see them on your calendar or address list.

Be careful to name your project categories exactly the same way you do in your folders. Consistency is key. Our goal is to instantly recognize which items belong to which projects, and to know exactly where to look to find what we need.

We’re just getting started

There! You’ve now created a few buckets for your project information. You’ve reduced the scope you’ll need to look at when browsing or searching for information. You’ll be able to find things faster, too, since it’s easy to use folders and categories as search filters. If you’re a true power user, you can set Outlook rules to automatically assign categories and folders to incoming items.

This gets all of your essential project data organized, but most of the real benefits come later: when you can begin pulling items together to get a complete picture of each project, when you can stop working on something and quickly pick it up again later, or when you can get a new coworker up to speed on a project without hunting for stray bits and pieces.

Related posts:

1. Establish your project context
2. How’s that project going?
3. Context is Everything

Once you figure that out, stop. Take an instant to make that association explicit. Put it in a folder, apply a tag, flag, or label, but do something to associate it with your work in progress. That simple act will save you time later. You won’t have to re-read the item to figure out what it is again. You’ll know what pile to stick it in if you get interrupted, and you’ll know where to look for it later.

Don't just figure out what bucket it belongs in. Put it inside.

I was reminded of this when I got a new cell phone recently. I felt like I was getting flooded with messages, but I knew I wasn’t getting any more mail than usual. I couldn’t figure it out. But then I caught myself at my desk one day, reading my mail again. And then it clicked.

On my old phone, I knew how to label and flag my incoming messages, but I hadn’t figured that out on my new phone yet. As a result, I found myself processing all my email twice. Once when it pinged my smartphone, and again at my desk later on, when I was planning my day.

Hey, I get enough email as it is. I certainly don’t need to double my mental workload.

Next time you get a message, assign it to one of your projects, through whatever method you like best. Establish the project context at the beginning so you never have to perform that mental triage again. It’s one of the simplest things you can do to streamline your work life.

Related posts:

1. Expanding your project context
2. How’s that project going?
3. Context is Everything