As promised during my talk at Ignite this week I will be sharing a series of posts discussing some of the things I’ve learned this year that led me to want to talk about getting to know your own Brain/Mind system better. Included will be links to a number of interesting books, articles and podcasts that anyone with a shred of intellectual curiosity should find interesting, enlightening and even entertaining.

If you don’t want to have to remember to come back, just sign up via email on the right and you’ll get it in your inbox. I don’t post often so it is a small commitment on your part.

I’m going to stop using hyperlinks in articles and switch to footnotes¹. The reason for this is that in researching issues around information overload and strengthening the power of attention, I have learned that typical hyperlinks in text reduce understanding² of the content by distracting the reader with alternate paths of thought. It can break attention and harm absorption and retention of material.

So this posting is simply a test of the plug-in I’ve added to the site³ to facilitate this.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed lately? Messages waiting for you on Twitter, Facebook, Digg/Reddit and LinkedIn? Plus your crowded mailbox with 6000+ unread and/or unaddressed messages? Join the club.

A lot of us are kind of overloaded at the moment, and might not even realize it is impacting them and people around them in negative ways.

On the list of fundamental truths about the human condition is that we are limited in capacity. Regardless of how intelligent you are, there is a breaking point. That point may be a lot closer than you think.

I’m fundamentally a technology guy, but I know that as I’ve spent more time in the world my relationship has changed in fundamental ways. At one time shiny and new was sufficient for me to be excited about something. Those days are long past. It still had better be shiny and new but it better enhance my quality of life in a real way. Accessing my email on the toilet is not enhancing my life in a real way.

I believe that technology has the ability to take us to a place where we can be more comfortably ‘human’, spending more time in our own skin, enjoying time with friends and family, taking in a nice day.

But we’re a long way from figuring out what that looks like.

The next step is finding a way to be connected without making ourselves nuts with overstimulation. This hasn’t gelled yet for me, it looks like it will be a long journey. Possibly years. But I’ve found a few first steps worth sharing.

1) Turn off email notification. On your desktop and phone. You don’t need to know the moment an email comes in. If you are waiting on a very specific email, say confirmation of a big contract. Turn it on while you are waiting, then turn it right back off again.

2) Bankruptcy is your friend. Empty your inbox. Turn on your vacation auto-responder with a “sorry I’ve declared email bankruptcy” message. Let them know it is you, not them, and if they have something they sent you in the past week that they really need a response to, please send it again.

3) Reduce the number of ways there are of getting your attention. Enumerate all the crap on your biz card or email sig, if there are more than 2 you should consider trimming down. If there are more than 4 you may need some serious help.

4) Don’t use your phone when you are a) in a meeting b) with your kids c) in bed d) on the toilet. You aren’t saving time, you’re hurting yourself. If you start fiddling with your phone while you are supposed to be listening to me, you better be feeling strong my friend, cause I’m coming at you.

5) Find a way to be alone in your head. Suggestions: a) take long walks (you can call them hikes if it feels better) from time to time b) take up meditation c) don’t turn on the radio/podcasts when you drive.

I recently found a promising looking book, Wisdom 2.0. I’ll review it once I’ve found a minute to read it…

Declare “email bankruptcy” today, right this moment. Sign off from twitter for a few weeks. Forget you know the URL to your social media site of choice. Stay the heck off Facebook. And turn off your damn cell phone for at least 10 hours a day. You might feel a little twitchy for a week or two, but in a month you’ll be glad you did. The world isn’t going anywhere without you. Trust me.

There are a bunch of weaknesses and biases in the way our brains work. They’re hard to see, thinking about the brain is kind of like trying to see your own eye. Without a mirror, without time and tools, it can’t be done. Most of us never seek out any information about how our own brains work. We certainly aren’t taught much of any value in school, it is a huge hole, just like failing to teach personal finance and routine economics.

Today I’m thinking about confirmation bias. This is a tendency for people to seek out and hear only things that reinforce opinions they already hold. It is a part of an overall problem of pattern recognition, we frequently miss things that don’t have a close referent. Information that is too new, too diverse from what we already know, is so hard to grasp it flies right by unnoticed. This concept blindness is the root cause of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

We’re comfy and cozy ensconced in information that fits our world-view.

And we’re lazy.

If you are any sort of leader within your organization, a founder, a CEO, a team lead, you must seek out diversity. I’m not talking about political correctness diversity, I’m talking about people who don’t think just like you. That difference may be culture, age, education focus, even industry. All too often I run across organizations that are made up of individuals who are greatly similar to each other. Having a team made up of people who will reach the same conclusion with the same data will cause you to ignore danger, miss opportunity, and squander talent.

If you are presenting information to a team, a board, a conference, a classroom, make an effort. Challenge preconceived notions, your own and theirs. Map out the distance between where people’s understanding is currently, and where it needs to go, and the intermediate concepts and understandings that will get them from A to B. Most of us just aren’t able to make the leap in one shot.

I’m tired of conferences where the presenters trot out their edgy take on something, in front of a self-selected audience that happens to be remarkably of the same opinion. This isn’t’ challenging. Make an effort, push the boundary.

Tell me something I don’t know.

Keeping an open mind is something that has to be worked at, or it will atrophy like any muscle.

Ignorance is not the problem in the world. It’s the things people “know” that aren’t so. — Will Rogers

Paul Graham wrote recently about the increasingly addictive nature of much of what we produce. He takes this as a consequence of technological progress, that we will inevitably create and discover things that are highly attractive to us. He points out that the Internet became addictive while we were in the middle of using it, it crept up on us.

In resisting the addictive and unhealthy things society has managed to adopt as normal, Graham argues that you will look eccentric. That if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly. I wear that as a badge of pride. I make my own bread and yogurt, grind my own meat (though I don’t raise it), and abstain almost entirely from fast food.

It is in our nature that we produce and consume addictive things. I mean that quite literally, our human ‘hardware’ is driven by emotions and cravings that are chemically based in our brains. It causes us to seek out food and sex, it forces us to sleep, it slows us down with depression when stress releases enough of the wrong chemicals.

For millions of years natural selection has served us very well. For the last hundred thousand we’ve been falling out of harmony with it. Our ability to invent and discover, to create and consume, to evolve our knowledge and society has drastically outstripped the speed of our physical changes. For awhile our cultural norms served as a buffer, we developed slowly enough that society could recognize behaviors that led to more harm than good and create taboo. Now change is so rapid that we’ve outstripped our capacity to recognize problems quickly enough.

The things that can become problems are very seductive. They appear to have substance, or are concentrated forms of things that did have substance but have lost them in their transformation.

One thing we’re really good at lately is info-porn. We watch the food network but still eat garbage and don’t cook, we watch the weather channel for more than the 60 seconds of information that is actually needed per day, we read concentrated news feeds, and see streams of ‘friends’ actions and thoughts. All while not really engaging in the living that should be represented by the thoughts.

We have a problem.

In the middle of the last century there was supposed to be this bright future ahead of us. It included things like flying cars and jetpacks, but it also included entire nourishing meals that would be taken in pill form. This obviously didn’t happen and aside from the practical considerations who would want to give up eating enjoyable meals? But we didn’t shake off the basic thinking that went into these bright visions of the ‘future’ and have continued barreling ahead without serious contemplation of where we’re going.

We’ve allowed our society, our lives, to become shallow. Overconsumption has become the norm; the consequence of trying to fill that empty place that should be taken up by real food, real knowledge, real achievement.

I almost just said “used to be” instead of “should be”. This is a common mistake and fallacy; that somehow in the good old days we didn’t have these problems. I don’t think that is true, in nearly every respect we continue to improve our overall state of being and we should have no desire to return to any earlier way of being. You can keep your open sewers, sunup to sundown agricultural labor, day long walks to the next village, leaded gasoline, slavery, coal heat, impact printers and Nokia phones.

I’m not going to argue that we all try to go back to living a simpler life. The conclusion here is not that simpler is better. Besides which our consumer, concentrating ways have led us to the brink of a disaster that can only be averted by accelerating change.

We can recognize the meta-problem; that new is not always improved, shiny is not always pretty, that societal norms are not safely normal, that fast and cheap can be dangerous. Dealing with the shallow but attractive things life throws at us is fundamental to being who we are, which things we choose to accept into our lives and which we reject is fundamental.

Things seem to always develop as bubbles. Humans find the next new hot thing and exploit the hell out of it until we use it up or destroy it, or we figure out it needs to be applied in moderation. The pace of change means that these curves are piling on top of each other, and the length of human attention spans means that we have a hard time recognizing when we’re in them. Our capacities are limited, from now on our reach will always exceed our grasp. And that’s a good thing.

We all face a choice every day. We can sit on our asses and eat pot pies and watch Fox news, or twinkies and Halo, or meth and the wall, choose your poison.

Or can ask ourselves what it means to be a member of the only known technological species as we reach an inflection point we may not get past intact.

So, long time no see. Nearly five months since I last posted to my own blog.

Juggling startup duties with being the father of three daughters and all the rest of the things life throws at you is always a challenge, and unfortunately when a few more health and life related balls were thrown my way I dropped some. Despite this things have continued apace over these months, the GuardianSight project is nearing a major milestone and will start seeing the light of day. I managed to produce another Ignite Cincinnati event at the end of June. And lots of household items which I won’t go into here.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing for GuardianSight and related projects, none of which is published yet. This will all be revealed in the fullness of time. Was I asleep? Had I slept?

I have heard plenty of complaints from friends and colleagues, and seen similar things in the press, that they don’t see the benefit in the iPad because they’ll still need to lug around a laptop and a phone. So now they have even more stuff and another charger to cart around with them. They’re mistaken for two reasons; firstly this is the zero generation of these new devices and the apps and UX paradigm is not mature, but more importantly these people all fall into the 9% of the 1–9-90 rule.

The 1–9-90 rule is a shorthand way of making an observation about populations. In any given group of people doing something they’ll break into three groups; creators, power users and consumers. This applies to the arts (artists, patrons and theater goers), sports (athletes, superfans and normals), literature, politics, YouTube, etc.

If you are a producer of content you won’t be able to get away with only having a post-PC device. Eventually you’ll be able to do a tremendous amount of things with it, but you’ll also need some supplemental support. That support may be a very powerful device equivalent to a desktop or laptop machine with a lot of screen space so you can edit complex video or do graphic design or write code, or it may be additional input devices like a large keyboard so you can write prose or more easily manipulate spreadsheets. Sorry but for the foreseeable future you are correct and will indeed need more gear.

The other 90% is ready to move on.

Apple, Microsoft and Google get this. They all have things in motion. If you are a developer and have not yet made the transition from native applications to web/cloud/app development you are about to have a rude awakening. The move to the new paradigm of end-user devices requires a change in how we approach UX and development. The application is no longer tied to the device, it exists in the world (i.e. ‘the cloud’) and should be accessible from any number of locations. Only one app at a time has the focus of the user, and should therefore take over the entire available display area when the user is directly interacting. These devices are much lower power than what we have in desktops and laptops today, so heavy lifting needs to be done in the cloud and the local end needs to be power sipping.

These changes require a clean break from the past. The Mac/Windows paradigm is dead for these 90% devices. Apple has managed to do an end run via iPhone and App Store. Yesterday the other shoe dropped; not only is the next WWDC being billed as “The center of the app universe” and heavily iPad/iPhone centric, but they have already cut the Mac out of the Apple Design Awards. So Apple is wasting no time in moving on.

Microsoft has been preparing as well. They’ve killed off the old Windows Mobile platform in a single stroke. The evolution of .NET and WPF over the past decade has managed to put it in a good position going forward with regard to apps for this new platform. With the introduction of WinPhone 7 they can now offer compelling apps running on a low-power device.

Google has Android and ChromeOS in its quiver. Android is getting a lot of traction lately and there are a number of tablet devices coming with Android already.

That brings us to Palm and HP. WebOS is theoretically a very compelling platform for this new generation of devices. It was designed to run on phones so it can work in a low-power environment. The UX paradigm they’ve adopted is even more suited to the larger screen of a tablet. Most importantly WebOS was designed from the ground up to be a cloud computing endpoint solution.

That said, I have no faith in the ability of HP or Palm to execute, and the merged entity has even worse chances. Mergers are very hard to do well, and it will take brilliant leadership and flawless execution to pull this off well and quickly. I wish them the best, the market will benefit from some robust competition.

Assuming they don’t screw up execution of the device designs, pricing and technology stack, how successful these platforms will be in the end comes down to two things; The Cloud, and Developers.

It’s about the Cloud

Devices in this new paradigm are mostly endpoints for apps that live elsewhere. This should go for not just the apps running on the device, but for the entire device. It needs to be a portal into the cloud, not a device that happens to have cloud connectivity. To that end it should never need to be connected to another machine physically for any reason, nor should there be any software needed to manage the device that isn’t running on the device itself and in the cloud. This means; no tethering to a PC, no sync, no iTunes.

Apple is already losing that battle and it hasn’t even really started. For business reasons it may be unable to win that battle. Their own entrenched lines of business will likely prevent them from doing the right thing. However; they have been making acquisition moves that make it appear they understand they need to move their music collection to the cloud instead of being a download and sync proposition, so they still are in the race.

Google gets it, they were born getting it. ChromeOS is designed to be a next generation platform specifically for this type of model. Android has given them experience running an app store and got their feet wet with devices. They already own most of our important data through Gmail, docs, voice etc. They’re well positioned.

Microsoft is learning fast. WinPhone 7 (and the Kin which has already been introduced and is based on the same technology stack) is designed to be a cloud endpoint solution. No tethering, sync and backup is to the cloud. They are moving fast with a hugely scalable cloud backend infrastructure. Very exiting looking devices are coming from a number of manufacturers, including new player Dell.

Developers Developers Developers

It all comes down to developers in the trenches. It always has.

This battle will be fought mostly in the cloud, but there are local apps as well. Google knows this and has been fighting to get HTML5 to be very compelling. If native apps have any edge at all it complicates things for them greatly, so they have hedged their bets with a native programming interface for Android, and will likely be forced to do so for ChromeOS as well. WebOS and Chrome as similarly situated with the developer stack being essentially the same as what would be used to develop any browser-centric web app.

Apple is saddled with technology that is rather tired at this point. Objective-C has always been an oddball platform and the tools are 5–15 years behind Microsoft depending on the area you look at.

Microsoft has an edge in local app development because of the maturity of their tools and the up to the minute capabilities of the languages they have on top of the .NET platform. They win the developer tools fight hands down on technical merit. Large portions of the developer community still treat Microsoft as being evil because they haven’t been paying attention to what has happened over the past 8 years. Whether Microsoft can really pull off being a serious contender going forward will be a hearts and minds campaign. They have to iterate very quickly, updating the WinPhone platform every six months, execute on their version of an app store flawlessly and more permissively than Apple has done. And they’ll need to reach out to the developers who think they love Ruby simply because it felt so good to stop being abused by Java.

All of this is the next phase, these battles will be fought and won or lost over the next 3–5 years. After the initial splintering caused by the different app platforms, at the end of it we’ll have moved to a deeper phase of compatibility as more and more of the essence of the applications moves onto the cloud and browsers become able to present ever more expressive and performant UX.

In the end everything is a commodity.

In 10 years when we look back at the shape of the computer industry, 2010 will mark the clear start of the post-PC era.

The PC as the primary computing device is dead. They won’t go away, but they won’t be the main way that the average person interacts with data any more. It has taken a surprisingly long time to get here.

Everyone who is remotely serious about computers knows the silly prognostications that have been knocked down thoroughly in the past. The president of IBM who is famously mis-quoted as saying that he thought there was a world market for maybe five computers. Or the other famous mis–quote from Bill Gates that 640k ought to be enough for anybody. Well here is another silly prognostication; in 10 years you will no longer care about RAM, storage capacity, CPU Speed or resolution.

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A lot of ink and pixels are being spilled this week about announcements made at the Facebook conference this week.  Many of the new things announced are already live.

Facebook is still lacking in one major area, and until this is fixed I and a lot of other people will remain uncomfortable. We need to be able to layer our social circle like an onion. We know lots of people, close family, distant family, close and casual friends, friends from the ‘old days’, close business partners, associates, people who you want to get to know better, the variety may be endless. At a minimum there is family, friends and business. For years I’ve made an effort to at least keep business and the rest separate, keeping business to LinkedIn. It looks like the Facebook future is being forced upon us anyway and things are about to get messy.

Having a social graph is useless without some degree of control over who gets what. I’m sorry, but everyone can’t be my ‘friend’.

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