Herbert Simon
The more information, the poorer you are
What runs short is never the news, it is the reader
"Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, 1971; The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969
I am afraid of missing anything new, so I try to read all of it. Why does more reading leave me more scattered?
What actually happened?
By the late 1960s computers were moving into offices and government departments, and the talk was mostly of getting more information to the people who made decisions. Simon, writing about how organisations should be designed, turned the question round. Information consumes something: the attention of whoever receives it. So plenty of information means attention has become scarce. By that reckoning, a new system is worth installing only if it keeps more away from you than it hands you.
Information has an appetite
His words: what information consumes "is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention", and with it the need to decide where that attention goes.
Three hundred messages read in a day, and by evening not one of them comes back to you.
Judge it by what it absorbs
He pushed the point into design. A new processing unit, whether a computer or a new department, saves the rest of the organisation attention only if it absorbs more information than it produces. If it adds a stack of reports every day, it is one more thing to read.
A tool that summarises your feed and then sends you ten extra items a day is a tap, not a filter.
Decide first what not to read
If attention is the scarce thing, the task is not to get a little more information but to ration attention: which sources may claim it, and which get not even a glance. The answer is cutting, not speed reading, and not another aggregator.
Someone subscribed to twenty channels gains more by leaving fifteen than by learning to skim.
The ant is simple, the beach is not
In The Sciences of the Artificial he describes an ant crossing a beach on a winding path. The ant is simple: "The apparent complexity of its behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself."
On a day with every notification switched on, the path you walk is bound to come out in pieces.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: something new appears every day, you are afraid of missing it, you chase each one, and nothing stays.
Ask first: of what I read this week, which items actually changed a decision I made - and how many hours did the rest take.
Where it goes wrong: reading it as ignore anything new. He is describing a filter, and the test of a filter is that it keeps out more than it lets in. Reading less is not the goal; keeping attention for the few decisions that need it is.
Lines to keep
Information eats something, and what it eats is attention.
A filter must keep out more than it lets in.
A scattered day may be the ground, not you.
Same situation, other people are asking
The direction changed and I'm still investing in the old one.How long do I keep giving the old skill one more year?The way I work is proven, and it is quietly going out of date.Something new appears every day and I'm scared of missing it.I can't keep up with the new thing · all 5 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.