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?

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