Review: Bit Literacy
Every Friday Free From Money reviews a book you might find useful for your personal or professional life
“One of the most anxiety-inducing side effect of the information era is a feeling that you have to know it all.”
- Richard Saul Wurman
In today’s modern age, free information can easily overwhelm the biggest of tech geeks. Bit Literacy attempts to create a system for users to master their digital realm by learning more about their computers as well as becoming more efficient with the computer.
Let’s take a brief walk through Bit Literacy:
Ch. 1 - Bits
Before the advent of computers, media had a physical weight to it. If you had too much reading material you would know it by the size of the paper stack next to your desk. Music didn’t have a digital format. News was delivered to you in the morning paper, or you watched it at a specific time of the day.
Now information lives in the form of ‘bits’ on your computer. The cost to send them is near zero, so it’s easy to become overloaded with too much.
Ch. 2 - Users
Modern knowledge workers need a way to manage their information. There are many companies trying to sell you products to help you take more in. They tell you that the load is easy to bear if only you had the right tools. What we really need is a new mindset on how to handle information, which is what Bit Literacy is all about.
Ch. 3 - The Solution
When information is free most of us tend to gather and hoard it, scattered across our hard drives, feed readers, and email. The solution, as the author puts it, is to “let the bits go.” Bit Literacy means engaging the information staring you in the face and moving it to its proper place. The problem isn’t technology. Nothing you buy will ever read a book for you or follow up on your emails. The solution is to become more efficient with what we have and work to lighten your information overload.
Ch. 4 - Managing Incoming E-mail
Knowledge workers need an efficient means to take their email and move it to the correct place. Part of the problem, according to the author, is that we use our inbox for things it wasn’t meant to do like keeping passwords, addresses and phone numbers, or as a to do list. I am guilty of many of these things, and now that I have been called out I plan on changing how I handle incoming emails.
Ch. 5 - Managing To-Dos
Managing your to do list is where work really begins. The problem with using email as a to do list is that not everything comes through email. The problem with a paper based to do system is the lack of scalability. As your task list grows a paper based system can become unwieldy. So the author addresses his requirements for a Bit Literate to do system. The one thing I really didn’t like about this chapter is the author’s peddling of his own company’s to do list software.
Ch. 6 - The Media Diet
This was by far my favorite chapter in the book, and the chapter the quote above comes from. Like any diet, media needs to be taken in moderation. I am an information junkie, and many times I can feel overwhelmed by the amount of information I try to consume through websites, magazines, books, RSS feeds, email newsletters, movies, and TV shows.
The problem, again, is that there is no technology that can process all of this information for you. It’s simply a matter of getting through it. Over time of course you might build up more than you could ever hope to get through, so it becomes necessary to filter what information you spend time on, and also to constantly prune what you get day to day. Some magazines go downhill. Dump them. Many RSS feeds from blogs are not worth the time to read. Delete them out of your reader. Same goes for everything. If you don’t get value out of it, let it go.
Ch. 7, Ch. 9, Ch. 10, Ch. 11
These four chapters give tips on managing photos, file formats, naming files, and storing files. I didn’t get much value out of these chapters since I consider myself to be well versed in file formats, organization, and naming. I also pursue photography as a hobby, so the photo organization tips were not useful for me. You may feel different.
Ch. 8 - Creating Bits
This chapter is probably where the “Elements of Style for the Digital Age” quote comes from, and was the other useful section of the book for me.
Other chapters discuss how you can become overloaded with information. This chapter is about keeping you from overloading others with too much information. When you display pictures, only show the best ones. There’s no need for duplicates. When creating a website the purpose should be clear immediately. When writing an email it should be easy for the recipient to quickly figure out what you are trying to say.
The author provides guidelines for creating a bit literate message, whether it is an email or an entire presentation. I imagine the structure could even be applied to websites or other forms of visual communication.
Overall this chapter is quite good, and should be required reading in some form or another for anyone using email at work.
Ch. 12 - Other Essentials
This chapter outlines other ways the knowledge workers can become more productive, and this is where geekiness really begins to shine. The author recommends learning to type quickly to improve efficiency, and gives some ideas on how to increase your writing speed using text expanders (which he annoyingly calls bit levers, as if trying to be clever) as well as switching over to a non-standard keyboard.
He also has a few other tips on computer productivity. For most computer savvy users this stuff will be old news, but for someone still trying to learn how to effectively use a computer it would probably be handy. These tips include learning to use macros, understanding how to take a screen shot, learning keyboard commands, and setting up your f-keys for one click launching of applications.
Ch. 13 - The Future of Bit Literacy
This chapter boils down to two things. First, the bit literate user should avoid DRM (Digital Rights Management). If you pay for data, such as music, you should own it with no restrictions. Second, the author recommends staying away from proprietary file formats, such as Microsoft Word files, as much as possible. These are two very good tips, and I completely agree with both of them.
Recommendation:
I like the basic premise of Bit Literacy, but for me most of the book was either common sense or knowledge that I already had. I am well versed in different file formats, to a point where I think the author’s breakdown of the different formats was far too simplistic. For lossless audio he mentions uncompressed .wav and .aiff formats, but does not mention the lossless compression formats like WMA, FLAC, or Apple Lossless. In the photos section he makes no mention of RAW, which is quickly becoming a standard for shooters with dSLR cameras. Granted, these shooters are probably more computer literate than most, but its still there.
This is a good book, but I read the entire thing in a few hours. Check it out from the library, take some good notes, and then reference those. Unlike other productivity books, such as Getting Things Done, you will probably not feel the need to go back and reread this one.
Bit Literacy is a part of the Personal MBA reading list
