Customer Reviews

Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload

5 star:		(94)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a superb book. As a doctor and an entrepreneur I have read many books on time management and being more efficient, and been disappointed by most of them. This book is by far the best I have read.

It has just enough theory to help the reader get the big picture, but nothing more. Unlike a lot of books that are twice as long as they should be, this short book respects the reader by delivering the information in an efficient and easy to digest manner.

I especially appreciate the clear instructions on how to implement the author's suggestions. I gave the book out to all my co-workers and several friends. Recently, our entire team talked about how each of us has implemented the book's ideas. Some of us are using all of them, and some are using a few of them, but no one decided not to use any of them. Given how challenging it is to change human behavior, I think this is amazing.

I give this my highest possible recommendation without any reservations at all.

I don't typically buy business books but want to be more effective in reaching my goals, and this book is worth its weight in gold. It helps you understand the problem of a huge amount of "bits" of information flooding your life (and inbox!) in this digital age, as well as multiple "bitstreams" - the bit sources one has to manage (your desktop, your family, your mailbox, your inbox, to-do list, task lists, voicemail etc.) This book, better than any other system, gives you a simple set of tools to get your inbox down to absolute zero and to pare down the number of bistreams you have to manage, so you can focus on achieving the more important goals and enjoying the finer things in life. Get this book.

The other night sitting at dinner, someone asked me the small-talk question of the age "So, how much time do you spend on your email?" I listened in surprise as I heard myself say "Oh, ten or fifteen minutes at most."

I used to think I was SO clever, for having discovered I could use my email inbox as an address book, database, calendar, bookmark, and to-do list all rolled into one. "Gee," I thought, "I bet most people aren't this effective in managing information." Was it any surprise that I had two thousand emails in one inbox, and seven thousand in another, stretching back seven years? And I even thought this was a GOOD thing. Oy!


It's the genius of Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy that he gives a thoughtful and convincing set of reasons for getting your email inbox down to ZERO every day. "Let the bits go" he says. He tells you exactly how to do it -- and no, it doesn't involve just deleting everything -- as well as why. He gives you the day-to-day method, and he gives you the one-time "induction" procedure that tells you how to get to that point. These MIT grads are so methodic about technology! Anyway, soon you too can share the shock of seeing an empty email inbox. And then... go on to get something done!

Hurst tells you how to perform the magic on your email in-box, your to-do list, your photos, tells you how and where you store your files (and a good way to name the files too) and how to manage your media diet. He recommends some free tools, and some you might want to pay for.

For me, the greatest value of this book will most likely be using what Hurst calls a bit literate to-do list. In a bit literate to-do list, you can create 'to-do' items with an email, with each item tied to a particular day, and display the items in priority order, showing detail as well as summary. The Bit Literacy book actually can serve as a manual for Hurst's online to-do list service, for which he charges three dollars a month. A cynical reader might suggest that the book ought to be given away free with a paid subscription, or the relevant chapter (Chapter 5) posted for free on his service's website (to be fair, maybe it is). Not being cynical, I simply signed up for the site, and am now moving forward in creating a more-aggressive summer vacation schedule. There has to be some personal payoff for increased productivity, doesn't there?


Whether you 1) just use his OEM strategy (open, engage, move) to clean up your email inbox, or whether you 2) sign up for his bit-literate to-do list gootodo dot com or whether 3) you go whole hog, and install and use the programs he recommends in a footnote on page 177 of Bit Literacy (you could drop six or seven hundred bucks), this book is worth well more than the modest amount time you will invest in reading it. This first edition lacks an index.

The advice in "Bit Literacy" is solid, no doubt about it. Some is even novel and thought-provoking; to-do items that can be deferred to specific later dates are definitely a "why didn't anyone think of this before?" idea, and I've been fiddling with my Outlook calendar to try to get it to work in a similar way. However, the smug tone of the writing is often off-putting. Most of Hurst's advice is fairly obvious, common-sense stuff that clearly works for him, but there is little consideration given to personal working style, almost as if he can't imagine anyone working or thinking differently from the way he does. If you don't clean out your e-mail inbox every day, for example, I assume he would deem you "bit illiterate." (FWIW, I tried this advice for a couple weeks but didn't notice any difference in my happiness or productivity, so abandoned it and went back to the way I've been managing my e-mail for the last twenty years. I have never felt any kind of pressure or stress from having a lot of things in my inbox.) Also mildly annoying is the term "bit lever," which is a term Hurst coined for a type of software that has been around for years and doesn't really need a new name (it's basically a fancy keyboard macro utility). There are some curious omissions; he talks about time lost switching between mouse and keyboard, but doesn't explain how to operate the computer entirely from the keyboard (even the Mac is largely capable of this) or how to add and customize keyboard shortcuts. He does get brownie points for discussing the Dvorak keyboard layout, although for most people the primary benefit of that is comfort, not productivity. Overall, the book presents a good solid system for dealing with digital information, but don't buy into the implication that there's only one right way. The "Bit Literacy" method is a tool, nothing more; take what works for you, and leave the rest.

As someone who is a geek, and as someone who has done extensive research into how people manage their time (with a focus on how various electronic devices fit into their time management practices), it's fair to assume that I'm not the target audience for this book. But I'd heard good things about the book, and I got a free copy somewhere, so I figured I'd give it a go. What a mistake.

"Bit Literacy" is a self-help book, and it feels like it. It spends the first few chapters trying to convince you that you have a problem and that only this self-help book can solve it. With some minor search-and-replace, I bet I could take any Dr Phil book and turn those first few chapters into the first few chapters here. The tone for the rest of the book is just as preachy, and just as arrogant.

The book is both unoriginal and misguided. The email chapter is nothing more than an overview of getting to Inbox Zero, a concept that isn't his but the author doesn't give credit where it's due. The to-do list chapter is an seemingly-endless ad for the author's website for to-do management (an issue which mars the rest of the book, although not as completely as in this chapter). The chapter on file management was so misguided as to make me laugh out loud. Likewise, the author's statement that we should use a service like delicious.com to manage bookmarks because it's somehow open is obviously bunk, given the Sturm und Drang associated with Yahoo!'s decision to cut support for it.

I was surprised at the author's pervasive anti-Microsoft stance. I'm a Mac girl myself, and I have no skin in the Windows/Mac game at this point in my life. I haven't used Windows in any appreciable manner in something like 15 years. But the constant digs were both needless and inaccurate. For example, there's a cheap shot at Outlook 2007 for Windows that whinges that the help file for how to create a new to-do is too long. I went and looked it up, and it is 14 steps. But it also lists every single step, including both changing to the task list view and all of the optional steps in the process (like setting a due date and changing the reminders). Go document your own process to that level of detail and see what that looks like.

What really annoyed me was that the author obviously came to write this book with no understanding of why people manage their time the way they do. This fault firmly puts it in the camp of many self-help books: no understanding of the underlying causes, but a layman who is convinced that their arbitrary solution is actually The One True Solution. In this regard, I view "Bit Literacy" as being rather too similar to books that propose cabbage soup diets as weight-loss methods.

The single piece of advice that I found useful in the book was the admonishment to take lots of pictures, and then delete not just the bad ones but also the ones that are only mediocre. If you take a lot of pictures of a given event, then you're more likely to get some really great ones. Then you keep only the really great ones. It's hard to get over the hump of deleting good-but-not-great pictures, but he is right that there's little need to keep them.

As someone who has extensively researched time management, I think that any given person's solution is going to be tailored to their usage. As a result, when considering the various approaches out there, you have to consider their underlying principles and not just the methods that they use to try to implement those principles. In reading books like Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, while some of the specific tools haven't been useful to me, the principle has been useful. For example, I've got my own way of getting to Inbox Zero, and I find that concept to be essential in how I manage my digital life. I didn't feel like Bit Literacy had an underlying principle other than "do things my way".

With the proliferation of information and knowledge workers, little thought has been given to teaching people how to manage the voluminous information flooding their lives and their email inboxes.

Bit Literacy teaches you how to manage your email - not the other way around.

If you're accustomed to spending all day working out of your In Box and you're constantly worried that you've forgotten some To Do item, you should order this book now and read it and re-read it.

Jeff

Differently than most of other reviewers, I felt the book was disappointing. To me this book was just a miscellaneous collection of the author's personal preferences and habits, cooked together and spiced up to form a pseudo methodology called 'bit literacy'.

For example, the author spent a whole chapter discussing how to organize to-do lists. In a 2 page analysis he reduces all forms of organization systems in paper to "post-its" (like if it was the de facto standard). He then tries to make the argument that post-its don't scale, are messy, and so the only option is 'bit literacy'. Yes, it may be, but who said that post-its is the only universal solution, even for paper? What about GTD? Covey? PCEO?

The author goes on - after depicting post-its as the cause for the failure of paper systems - and then introduces a Gootodo, a system created by the author, supposedly as the only 'bit literacy' compliant digital system, due to some 4 arbitrary rules. Questionable rules I'd add, like proposing avoiding contexts, the importance of priorities within your tasks, and the need to set a date for each task. Otherwise it's not "bit literacy", like if all other productivity systems based on Palms, iScribbe, cell phones, etc were just bit illiterate. And obviously, not a single mention to any of these other systems.

Other chapters have similar flaws: directory filename convention is total arbitrary, trying to sound like the only solution to organize directories (putting the name of the author in front of the filename... wow!). Same for how to organize your photos. To me the only 'bits' of information nice were the chapter about inbox management with Inbox Zero (that is largely explored by other authors), and the proposal to 'let bits go', considering the capacity to generate them is just infinite.

While I fancy the concept of bringing tactical proposals to better manage information overload, I think this book totally missed the point. You'd better go with GTD with lifehacker.com than with 'bit literacy'.

This is an excellent book -- a quick read in straightforward language -- that's sure to plant important ideas for self-management into the minds of its readers. I've already benefited from it, even though I've already been keeping my inbox(es) clear for the past several years. Hurst offers specific, thoughtful advice on everything from to-do lists to file-naming schemes, but his most important contribution for me was in his emphasis on establishing a "media diet". Just as a healthy person eats an adequate variety of foods in moderate quantities, so should the bit-literate person ingest a variety of media -- but only in moderate quantities.

One of the great problems we have in our information-saturated age is that we don't know to say "enough!" -- much less *when* to say it. Hurst gives lots of specific advice about when to say it, but in the overriding theme of Bit Literacy, he offers an even better service by hammering home the message that we all must say it at some point. Otherwise, the bits will continue to overwhelm us, and all the information in the world won't improve our lives.

The lessons of this book, well implemented, cannot help but improve the productivity and ease of knowledge workers.

As I write this, I've learned that Yahoo email has offered me free "UNLIMITED STORAGE". It was only a month ago my limit was a jynormous 2 gigabytes.
Although I love free stuff (and bits), after reading Bit Literacy I will never need such extravagant space. These days rather than exhausting my valuable energy on the email treadmill, my inbox works for me rather than me for it.
Designed for the expert and the lay-person, Mark's suggestions will help you say "delete" to distraction and time wasting, and yes to productivity (à la Stephen Covey's First Things First). And yes, this review is kept brief for that very important reason.

After just starting to read it, "Bit Literacy" has already made an impact on my productivity. I used to be guilty of using my inbox as a task manager. Now that I've stopped that, it's so much easier to get my e-mail under control and the important parts of my job done.

"Bit Literacy" has been a great investment. I've also recommended the book to all of my staff.