Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload

This is a superb book. As a doctor and an entrepreneur I have read many books on time management and being more efficient, and been disappointed by most of them. This book is by far the best I have read. It has just enough theory to help the reader get the big picture, but nothing more. Unlike a lot of books that are twice as long as they should be, this short book respects the reader by delivering the information in an efficient and easy to digest manner. I especially appreciate the clear instructions on how to implement the author's suggestions. I gave the book out to all my co-workers and several friends. Recently, our entire team talked about how each of us has implemented the book's ideas. Some of us are using all of them, and some are using a few of them, but no one decided not to use any of them. Given how challenging it is to change human behavior, I think this is amazing. I give this my highest possible recommendation without any reservations at all.

I don't typically buy business books but want to be more effective in reaching my goals, and this book is worth its weight in gold. It helps you understand the problem of a huge amount of "bits" of information flooding your life (and inbox!) in this digital age, as well as multiple "bitstreams" - the bit sources one has to manage (your desktop, your family, your mailbox, your inbox, to-do list, task lists, voicemail etc.) This book, better than any other system, gives you a simple set of tools to get your inbox down to absolute zero and to pare down the number of bistreams you have to manage, so you can focus on achieving the more important goals and enjoying the finer things in life. Get this book.

With the proliferation of information and knowledge workers, little thought has been given to teaching people how to manage the voluminous information flooding their lives and their email inboxes. Bit Literacy teaches you how to manage your email - not the other way around. If you're accustomed to spending all day working out of your In Box and you're constantly worried that you've forgotten some To Do item, you should order this book now and read it and re-read it. Jeff

You know, it only took a few chapters of the book to make me stop and change my e-mail habits... I realized that I don't have to have active messages in front of me. Remember how the last day of school felt every year? How it was hard to believe there was no homework for the whole summer? That's how it felt to see a clear inbox. It's a great incentive to keep it clear, too. I can get back to that warily giddy feeling every morning.

The other night sitting at dinner, someone asked me the small-talk question of the age "So, how much time do you spend on your email?" I listened in surprise as I heard myself say "Oh, ten or fifteen minutes at most." I used to think I was SO clever, for having discovered I could use my email inbox as an address book, database, calendar, bookmark, and to-do list all rolled into one. "Gee," I thought, "I bet most people aren't this effective in managing information." Was it any surprise that I had two thousand emails in one inbox, and seven thousand in another, stretching back seven years? And I even thought this was a GOOD thing. Oy! It's the genius of Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy that he gives a thoughtful and convincing set of reasons for getting your email inbox down to ZERO every day. "Let the bits go" he says. He tells you exactly how to do it -- and no, it doesn't involve just deleting everything -- as well as why. He gives you the day-to-day method, and he gives you the one-time "induction" procedure that tells you how to get to that point. These MIT grads are so methodic about technology! Anyway, soon you too can share the shock of seeing an empty email inbox. And then... go on to get something done! Hurst tells you how to perform the magic on your email in-box, your to-do list, your photos, tells you how and where you store your files (and a good way to name the files too) and how to manage your media diet. He recommends some free tools, and some you might want to pay for. For me, the greatest value of this book will most likely be using what Hurst calls a bit literate to-do list. In a bit literate to-do list, you can create 'to-do' items with an email, with each item tied to a particular day, and display the items in priority order, showing detail as well as summary. The Bit Literacy book actually can serve as a manual for Hurst's online to-do list service, for which he charges three dollars a month. A cynical reader might suggest that the book ought to be given away free with a paid subscription, or the relevant chapter (Chapter 5) posted for free on his service's website (to be fair, maybe it is). Not being cynical, I simply signed up for the site, and am now moving forward in creating a more-aggressive summer vacation schedule. There has to be some personal payoff for increased productivity, doesn't there? Whether you 1) just use his OEM strategy (open, engage, move) to clean up your email inbox, or whether you 2) sign up for his bit-literate to-do list gootodo dot com or whether 3) you go whole hog, and install and use the programs he recommends in a footnote on page 177 of Bit Literacy (you could drop six or seven hundred bucks), this book is worth well more than the modest amount time you will invest in reading it. This first edition lacks an index.