Filtering Information: Why You Cannot See Everything
26. May, 2009 
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I am tired. I am exhausted from all the information that is poured over me daily.
I already stopped watching television (except for Knight Rider). I only listen to non-stop music radio stations.
Sometimes it feels like being hosed down by information.
In the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” Andrew B Newberg, MD states:
“Our brain receives 400 billion bits/second of information, but we’re only aware of 2000 bits/second.”
Great. I seem to be able to use broadband, but currently I am running a 14Kb dial in modem.
I need to neglect information. I have to reduce the input.
Fish have a great mechanism for this, it’s called “front priority“:
“If the fish act upon any piece of information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slight chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream the information flow.”
If we ignore pieces of information we are better off than having all the information? Can this be true?
Apparently so.
In his book “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term “thin-slicing“:
“… our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones.”
This “thin slice of reality” is a pattern of all things happening in your surroundings. You take the slice and compare it with patterns stored in your mind. When you find a matching pattern, you have made up your mind about a particular situation. This is an unconscious process.
These patterns are dynamic systems in action, a human system seen over a time period. Patterns are trends over time and involve dependencies with other systems.
To spot such trends in projects we use metrics as indicators. If I have the right metrics I can ignore everything around me and focus just on the dashboard.
Can this be true?
We use metrics as indicators, but we need to visualize the data in such a way that trends and dependencies get visible.
The Gantt chart is a bad example. A very bad example.
Tufte presents a design for a Project Management interface that addresses some of the problems with rendering large Gantt Charts. He advocates splitting the chart into two views. At the top of the chart, you see the project timeline laid out in phases, with the current phase denoted with a unique color. On the bottom half of the chart, the local view basically zooms in on the current phase to display more detail.
I am still tired.
But it seems the best thing is to focus on a few things, reduce the input. It will increase my performance. But only if the input is presented in a proper way, in a way that visualizes trends and dependencies.
Can this really be true?
Bas, this is a perfect post for me to bring up PoP Project’s philosophy. Keep the project divided into only seven sub projects. Instead of 300 line Gantt charts, if you wake up every day to see the status of seven pieces, life will be a little less noisy.
Here is a little support for our idea: http://paradigmpop.com/node/46
Excellent post, Bas.
I think our embodied nature hides from us a lot. The brain each of us has is an actual physical brain, with many strange and remarkable capacities. It’s not an abstraction, still less a generalized “problem-solver”. Thinking on how we fit best into the physical and other contexts is at the heart of what I’ve been calling situated geekery.
@Diwant – Thanks for the link. This reminds me of the user interface design classes I got years ago: never provide a user with more than 5/7 options
yeah, makes sense: never provide a PM with more than 7 options/tasks/things to monitor 
@GeePawHill – Thanks for dropping by… and you just got yourself a new subscriber to your blog. Excellent stuff! And anyone with Fluent Self in the blogroll is worth checking out
Diwant, I never heard of the PoP Philosophy before… I like it. Less overwhelming, easier to jump into work, when you don’t feel inundated by a billion little tasks (death by a thousand cuts!).
@Bas No problem. Actually one of my UI bibles (Seth Godin’s “The Big Red Fez”) says that for UI the number of things should only be 1, which is very harsh but very helpful as well.
@Andrea Thanks, I am glad you like it! The PoP philosophy is something we have come up with to solve the 500 line Gantt charts. It dovetails with several other good ideas including Management by Objective (MBO)where each of these seven things is owned by the smart people on your team. It is kind of cool to see this happen because a PM becomes more a project orchestrator at that level.