May we please retire that technological dinosaur known as voicemail?

Human beings are primarily visual creatures, and our aural canals offer a problematically thin reed for trying to communicate with each other. The telephone, and especially voicemail, has been plagued by extremely limited bandwidth and all sorts of interface problems. The only worse use of our senses to communicate would be Smellmail (“exhale through your left nostril to delete, through your right nostril to save…”). Or maybe Tastemail.

The New York Times recently took up the topic of whether voicemail is obsolete:

When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. [...]

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Many dread the process or… avoid it altogether, raising the question: is voice mail on its way to becoming obsolete?

The answer is yes. Voicemail may have been useful once upon a time, but there’s no reason to put up with it any longer.

Those of us afflicted with comically short attention spans tend to have especially strong feelings about this; such is my own loathing for voicemail that I haven’t even bothered to check my personal messages since sometime in 2006.¹ After all, technology marches ever on, and a bevy of superior options for time-shifted communication are now possible with email, text messages, and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, or your other favorite Web 2.0 app.

New tools from Google, Apple, and others are helping to ease the migration from voicemail by moving voice messages into our visual inbox. I’ll review my favorite of these tools, Google Voice, in the days ahead.

1. Friends and family know this; unsolicited callers don’t. It’s a good filtering system! [↩]

It’s that time of year when our thoughts turn to… calendars!

I still find paper calendars to be immensely useful. It’s far easier to glance at a wall calendar—to figure out which day of the week some future date lands upon, for example—rather than disrupt my current task with several clicks into a software program. I also like to plan my trips and various projects with different scratch calendars that I can easily make a mess of, recycle, and try again.

Most of us use computer-based organizers these days, tracking our meetings and tasks in programs like MS Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes (God help you!), and so on. These programs all have “Print” functions, of course, but their output is often cluttered and unhelpful.

If you’re a weirdo like me and like to print out lots of pristine calendars for planning/scratch/whatever purposes, check out these free online PDF calendars:

• Monthly Calendars
• Annual Calendars

You can get PDFs for up 8 predefined sizes—or enter a HUGE custom size—and there’s an option to start each week on either Sunday or Monday.

The same site also has some other neat freebies, including a wide variety of different graph and grid paper as printable PDFs:

The phone in my office, just
above my paper calendars

• Engineer’s Paper
• Accounting Ledger Paper
• Storyboards
• Music notation staves

I know, I know: Get with the program, Chris! We live in a paperless world! Well, until I’m sitting at a workstation with two 50″ monitors mounted above a 120″ touchscreen desk surface, I’m going to keep using paper to help me harness my thoughts and improve my productivity.

In a provocative and insightful interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Internet guru Clay Shirky says that he’s had enough with people complaining that information overload is harming our society (em. below is mine):

Oh, those are the stupidest people in the entire debate [...] the information overload people are the most narcissistic [of all] because information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early -to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.

[...] The reason we think that there’s not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we’re actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we’re just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like “Oh, there’s so much more information.” But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that’s been the normal case.

This put me in a bit of a reflective mood. Shirky is right at the societal level, of course, but information overload can be a real problem at the individual level.

I’ve been grappling with information overload for years now, both from a time management and psychological perspective. There’s seemingly infinite breadth of high-quality books, magazine articles, and Websites to read, and there’s simply no possible way that a human being can read them all. And with the neverending torrent of new content that technology now streams at us—via email once upon a time, through RSS nowadays—it’s natural to wind up feeling helpless at times. How am I supposed to keep up?

The answer, of course, is that I can’t. Part of the deep wisdom of David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the insight that stress is a subconscious reaction to our unkept agreements with ourselves. If we find ourselves continually stressed about something—as I sometimes do, at my inability to keep up with All Quality Content Everywhere—then we have to renegotiate our commitments.

Allen’s Zen-like insight buried itself into my head, but it took a couple months for me to absorb and apply it to the concept of information overload (I’m slow like that, sometimes) (OK, oftentimes). But it was an incredibly freeing moment when I finally just admitted to myself “you know what? There is going to be lots of amazing material that I will simply never get to. It’ll exist somewhere out there, in the ether, without my absorption; in most cases I will never even know about it. And that’s OK!”

It’s absurd how relieved I felt, just making this simple and obvious admission to myself. But it helped, and I began the slow and painful process of paring back my “to read” list,¹ and learning to sometimes just let content fly by me untouched.

There’s still some guilt when admitting that I will never read certain books, but at least I’m admitting it now. And I still waste way too much time reading endlessly recursive links, but there are fewer of them now, and I’ve begun to get a handle on it from a time-management perspective.² Absolutely no more “to read later” bookmarks, either. I’ll open something in a new tab and, if I haven’t gotten to the tab in due course, I’ll ruthlessly close it.³

So here’s to hoping that the filters continue to improve, and that our individual cognition systems match pace correspondingly. Or that the robot servants arrive soon to help us out.

1. Largely comprised of the links under “Blogroll,” in the navbar on the right side of this page. [↩]
2. This has been especially helpful with battling the mildly obsessive-compulsive need to read—or at least scroll past—everything on, say, a news site like TechCrunch, especially after I’ve missed several days. The time wasted getting “caught up” just isn’t worth it. If an amazing news story broke during the time I missed, or if a brilliant and groundbreaking new insight was published, I can rest assured that I’ll eventually hear about it again. [↩]
3. Well, OK, not very ruthlessly. I’m still far from being an information ninja. I’ll often keep tabs open for weeks or even months before finally reading them, which is a pretty bad habit when it’s more than a few (and it is). But I’m getting a little bit better every day! [↩]