Complete openness of all things will bring the apocalypse. When society becomes completely open and there are no more secrets we will all go a little nuts. We will all see that nobody is perfect and we all lie, cheat and steel. When this happens the global government will require all homes to be video monitored for your safety to insure we all comply with the law leading to the impending doom of modern civilization or something.

Good post. I think the issue really does come down to filtering, but also behavior, specifically how people choose to determine what is a priority vs what isn’t. E-mail, and social networks, becomes a priority because people don’t want to miss information, regardless of what kind it is. We’ve been taught to value information over all else, without really considering the actual value of that information.

By the way is it possible to subscribe to your blog via email. I like the information here and would like to continue getting it, albeit in a format that works for me.

Thanks!

Taylor Ellwood

I feel the perfect watchtower includes a large degree of ruthlessness in selecting the information we consume.

By leaving the task of parsing our information to an assistant, human or robot, we abdicate responsibility for our information consumption. Essentially, we would choose to become overloaded by information by asking for assistance in choosing the information we consume.

Last year I read, in Fast Company if memory serves, that the best skill schools (elementary through post-secondary) can impart on their students is the ability to consume a massive amount of information, synthesize out the important bits and decide how to proceed.

The perfect watchtower might not be something that is developed, it might be something that *evolves.*

I also tend to know who likes what method of communication, so the people who will not answer voice mail, I text.

E-mails, tweets, etc . . ..for items that can wait or when there is a whole lot of information, or if it is the preferred method of communication for formal business matters which need to be archived, etc.

Cutting down on the many different ways to communicate is key so that you do not waste valuable time. Think before you press send in any of the communications tools.

It’s pretty simple.

I think the answer is the phone – if I NEED to reach someone, I call them, if it is urgent/now/immediate.

If I am receiving a call, I know certain numbers will be answered no matter the situation – the childs school, the Nanny, the Sitter, someone I know is dealing with a situation. Otherwise – GoogleVoice transcribes it, and I can look at the (poorly) transcribed call and usually determine the urgency from that.

People need to start respecting the immediacy of the telephone, and use the other methods (text, gchat, twitter, email) for conversational situations.

But yes, it would be so nice to have someone who could sort through the 1800 unopened emails on my Blackberry, I don’t have 4 hours for that.

I don’t believe in automated filters. I believe in what I think might be interesting the moment I see it, usually based on who recommended this book or post or music or whatever.

Checking emails often is good. Althought when I am in a meeting or having diner with someone, I rarely check at my phone; it would looks as if I’m constantly checking my watch… I mean come on!

Duff is correct, gone are the days of the secretary who knew exactly how to manage the bosses “inbox” and “outbox”, she/he filtered everything and usually was compensated quite well.

I’m reading Chris’ comment. Chris…you want the perfect watchtower, you don’t want “new”, but “now”. Remember last February you said: “But please, can we please lose our addiction to urgency? Because I’m in a serious mood to defend AnyWHEN vigorously.” You even wrote the AnyWHEN manifesto!

Well, signing off for tonight.

The way I’d envision your watchtower working (or at least how I’m trying to do it with my own product), it’d be a combination of storing the important stuff somewhere separate and pushing alerts to you for the truly urgent…so you actually could check all your accounts (filtered or unfiltered) less often and still be proactive on what you wanted to work on for the rest of the day.

Awesome stuff!

And I also don’t want “new” to be the default. I want “now” to be the default.

There is no escape from having to make choices based on partial information and to deal with the outcomes of one’s choices. Mark Hurst in Bit Literacy seems to harp on this more than anyone else in the productivity scene, emphasizing taking responsibility for one’s “bit stream” vs. trying to push the responsibility on someone else or a piece of technology. I tend to agree with him.