Indentity & Management

If you’re anything like me, you have a hard time with productivity. It’s not that my interests are so fabulously varied or that I’m procrastinating. It’s more that I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility - leading me to answer every email and IM promptly and appropriately. I am also a social creature who has made her work as a solitary web developer - the common online tools, like IM, blogging, email, etc, keep me connected; but thoroughly distracted. Since so many of them - along with most things online - are log in driven, I also have a problem with ‘identity management’ or, more simply, keeping track of all my usernames, passwords, and what they gain me access to.

Over the past few weeks, okay months maybe, but who’s counting - I’ve been hung up on this idea of daily distractions and identity managment at both work and home and how they are related to indentity management, ’cause I think they are. Today, I set out to do some focused research on this theme with the idea of unearthing two bits of information: 1. a list of techniques everyday people use for managing tasks to achieve efficiency and productivity (yikes, that even scares me and I wrote it) and 2. a list of people who work or dabble in this field - having developed some great technique for managing or have done research on how others are doing it. Please leave a comment, if you might be able to contribute to either list.

I started with Meet the Lifehackers a fascinating NYTimes article by Clive Thompson.

Thompson paraphrases David Rose founder and president of the terrifically gadgety Ambient Devices:

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is… 20 years ago an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days… Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heidenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whther an email message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it - at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for out attention, like needy toddlers.

I don’t think anyone who works in any kind of office-type job would argue with that. But one small example, to me, is the vast number of usernames and passwords that it takes to fully participate in these online worlds. It’s akin to having to issue a passcode for every doorway I pass through. I used to have a tidy little sheet of paper next to my desk at home, but then I got a palm and kept a few things in there. Then I got a job, prompting dozens more identities for that and kept at work. But what to do with the hybrids? What if I’m working from home and have to login to ALA to register for a conference, but the password’s at work. Then I launched this site and many more usernames. Everywhere I go, I’m asked to create a new identity. I know I’m not alone, this is a symptom of modern living.

We’re all familiar with the ‘halo of post-its’; but they’re not all that private, secure, or portable. I’m interested in Danny O’Brien’s approach of collecting the techniques of the most ’sickeningly overprolific’ people he knew.

There are hundreds of little tricks, habits, desktop arrangements, and hacks being invented (and I suspect, reinvented) by people to organise their life using today’s technology. We very rarely get to see any of it, because we all assume no-one else would be interested in the dull rigmarole of our lives.

The Thompson article touches on a few techniques. O’Brien found (quoted by Thompson):

Their suggestions were surprisingly low-tech… They all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it. Some of O’Brien’s correspondents said they opened up a single docuemnt in a word-processecing program and used it as an extra brain, dumping in everything they needed to remember - addresses, to-do lists, birthdays - and then just searched through that file when they needed a piece of information. Others used e-mail - mailing themselves a reminder of every task, reasoning that their in-boxes were the one thing they were certain to look at all day long.

I am a big advocate of social software tools and libraries embracing them in the name of user-centered service, a trend to which many librarians have been slow to respond. It occurs to me that perhaps they’ve reached critical mass and can’t face managing anymore identities than they already have and I can’t say I blame them. They do have the potential to increase, divert, or alter an already heavy workflow. Tools to better cope with identity management in the technology age might inspire more participation in it.