A mouse walks up to a piece of cheese. The cheese happens to be sitting inside a loaded 
mousetrap. The first mouse pays with his life. The second mouse comes around and eats the cheese. Here is the life-or-death question: Did the second mouse get the cheese simply because he was lucky, or did he use the information provided by his very dead pal to determine it was safe to eat the cheese? We will probably never know the answer. While most information will not yield life or death results, there is no doubt that better information generally leads to better outcomes for all parties.
If you have been around as long as I, think for a minute how much has changed in the last 20 years. In 1991, the year I graduated from college, very few people used the Internet. To do research we had to go to a library. To get news we read newspapers, listened to radio, and watched TV. To communicate we either met in person or talked on the telephone. Fast forward 20 years and we see that we have literally had an information revolution. Today we have so much more data available to us from so many more venues. Over the past 20 years the Internet and cellphones have completely changed how we communicate. Before it was the privilege of a very few to create information and the vast majority of us were simply consumers of that information. Today, anybody with a computer and an Internet connection can syndicate information to the world through a wide variety of channels.
And of course, change has brought us its own problems. Now we get bombarded with more data than ever before from cellphones; text messages; Facebook updates; Tweets; and, yes, still people communicating with us face-to-face. However, to my knowledge, there is nobody yet teaching us how to adjust to this new era of information overload. Clearly I personally love everything about where the Internet and modern technology has evolved. Yet, I believe we are lacking knowledge about how to make the most out of the opportunity. How can we only get the information that is truly important to us right now and how do we tune out everything else?
While we have access to more data than ever before, we still only have 24 hours a day to consume the information. Unlike computers that get faster and faster all the time, the human brain has remained very much the same for the past 50 thousand years or so. While many may pride themselves in being great multi-taskers, plenty of research suggests that humans are not very good at processing more than one stream of data at the same time. As such it has become very important for us to prioritize data.
While talking to my daughter’s kindergarten teacher this morning my cell phone rang. I promptly ignored it deciding that at that point in time, giving full attention to my daughter’s teacher was more important than answering the phone. For the 30 minutes or so that I have been working on this blog I have received 8 e-mail messages, one voice mail, 2 text messages, 54 Facebook updates, and 228 new Twitter updates. (Fortunately, I wouldn’t know this unless I purposely checked.) I make sure to turn off these distractions when I need to focus on a project—such as writing a blog.
What if I take the temptation to check my Twitter feed right now? Most likely, 95% of the updates would be completely irrelevant, but one update might say that the stock market is going down fast. At that point I would have to go in and check how my own stocks were doing. Perhaps a favorite band is announcing that they are going on tour! Forget the blog, I would have to go to their web site and find out if they are playing in my town. And if they are, I would have to go right to Ticketmaster to reserve tickets.
My point here is that while we have so much more information at our fingertips, a lot of this information is the right information at the wrong time. Today, we must exercise a lot more discipline to filter out the information that is most important to us and to what we are doing. Right now, what is important for me is to write this blog, not to be led in a completely different direction because of something I read on Twitter or Facebook.
Perhaps we do need more discipline to succeed today; however, it is not just our behavior that needs to change. Technology still has a long way to go in becoming smarter at distinguishing between information that is beneficially important to us right now and what information is not. To prove this point, I had to go no further than to my spam folder. Sure enough, right there among 100s of completely irrelevant spam messages was a completely legit message sent to me by a prospective client that I met at a conference last week. Other than the fact that I have never communicated with this person via e-mail, there was nothing unusual about the content of the e-mail message that would suggest that it should be flagged as junk mail. As processing power continues to get more powerful in our hardware and as software continues to evolve, I believe that we will get smarter tools that will help give us the right information at the right time. For example, what if my computer could read this while I am writing it and point out to me the research that indeed demonstrates that human are not good at multi-tasking; or perhaps the opposite, point out to me that recent research has proven the opposite to be true? I believe as technology continues to improve we will get more assistance from our technology in giving us the right information at the right time.
In subsequent blogs I will address these topics in more detail. What behavioral changes do we, as human beings, need to make in the future to be successful in the information age? What changes do I expect will happen to technology, specifically software, to give us better information? As has always been our saying about our own RiteTrack solution, our goal is to give our clients the right information at the right time. With more and more information available to us, that becomes a greater challenge. Fortunately, all of us here at Handel thrive on big challenges.