Important Things — to simplify your life!

We live in a “cruel crazy beautiful world” (Johnny Clegg), so here are some ramblings to try and improve and simplify things.

There are billions of people connected, sharing almost everything all the time; communicating, yearning for likes, shares, numbers of comments and retweets; 500+ LinkedIn contacts, 500+ Facebook friends; hundreds or even thousands of Instagram & Twitter followers; all expecting instant responses.

It’s awesome — never before have we been able to tap into such an amazing collective of knowledge, literally in the palm of our hands. That said, everyone is challenged, trying to find the balance between this super-connected world, information overload and simply trying to stay sane.

I constantly hear promises to cut back - “I’m going cold turkey and getting off Facebook and Twitter”, “I’m going back to my Nokia 3310!” (Nokia even re-released it!); or advice to tone down the flow: “Charge your phone in the kitchen overnight, not next to your bed!”; or to the kids: “No phones at the table!”, “Put the iPad down and go play outside!” …

Unfortunately, those trying to cut back on social media for a period of time are just faced with an even bigger flood of information when they eventually rejoin the masses.

We’ve also seen the rise of timer-based communication channels like Snapchat, and a greater push for privacy and encryption as governments deepen their push for access to everything, all in the name of safety.

The internet of things (IoT) is set to provide a multiplying effect unlike anything we’ve seen before, where everything (not just everyone) is connected, giving us data on every minute detail (sooo much content), how the hell will we be able to absorb and make sense of this? Surely this will just be a self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in the The Singularity, with only Artificial Intelligence (AI) having the capability to truly deal with this mega-flood of ones and zeros?

So, is there a balance? Can we stay connected, in control, as these opposing forces get stronger and stronger and the amount of content grows and grows?

A lot of tech strives to make things simpler (or claims to), but can it be done?

I believe so…

1) Filter out what’s important to you

You can’t do everything or read everything… just choose the important things and let the other stuff fall through the gaps, waiting for AI to tell you what’s important.

I don’t know if there is a magical number of important things for a typical person in this super-connected world — it could be 5, 10 or maybe 50? My gut says it’s probably about 10–20 things across your personal, work and social lives. Perhaps this number is going up, as we become more connected?

Anyway, you need a system for at least capturing what these important things are… a simple list of 5 to 10 things may be a good starting place?

For example (obviously dependent on who you are & what you do):

1. Work life: Top 2 -3 projects or functions/responsibilities: eg Project 1, Project 2 & Sales
2. Family life: eg Spouse/partner, kids, renovation, budget
3. Social life: eg Banter with close friends/social groups, sports teams, organise a social event…

If you can improve the way you interact on your top 5 to 10 important things, it’s going to make your life simpler.

2) Focus on those important things

Now that you have the list, focus and work out how to improve or simplify how you interact on those important things.

Sure the list will change, shrink, or grow overtime, but allowing you to know what’s important will make it so much easier to coordinate, prioritise, communicate and interact with those around you.

Sometimes the important thing will be a specific task, sometimes it’s simply communicating with a group of people, important to you, sometimes it’s a mix of multiple things — that’s the point, it’s meant to be fluid. Don’t think of functional solutions… e.g. task management, project management or conversation centricm, team/group centric tools… just think about the important thing.

Some important things, like a project will need attributes/functionality like tasks, conversation threads, timelines etc. Some important things, like general family communication, will probably just need personal conversation and perhaps a shared calendar and some centralized content library (eg photos, docs etc). Other important things (eg work responsibilities) will need more sophisticated applications, combined with conversations, tasks and transactions.

When looking for an interaction solution to focus on these important things, try and choose a solution that aggregates the interaction channels: communication, collaboration, transactions & processes.

Solutions like email or SMS are great solutions that are ubiquitous but they often split the communication channel/conversation, as you rarely use one of them by itself and then are constantly trying to use your brain to bring things together and remember what was said in the specific communication or functional channel. For example, “I know Bob sent me that thing, but was it in an email, WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Wiki, Blog… I know it’s there somewhere??? Arrggghh!!!”

The more people that are involved with the important thing, the harder it gets. Just think of one of those long email chains where everyone starts to “reply all” and then a few people respond via SMS/instant messenger, followed by a few side replies to the email thread. What a mangled mess!

Another critical factor is privacy. Depending on what the important thing is, being able to control the level of privacy and role-based interaction is super important. For example, when a group interacting with an important topic gets beyond 15 or so, you probably want to start to look at moderating the comments, so things don’t spin out of control. Having private sub-conversations aside from the group is important too… ie so you don’t start using other channels and then have to work out how to bring the result of that thread back into the fold.

Don’t worry, at least you have your list of important things, a great place to start and consolidate your online interactions… if you can find a way to collect all the conversation, collaboration, transactions and processes flows in one place for your important things it’s going to simplify your life!

3) Keep adapting

Nothing is static in the super-connected world. There’s always going to be new information, applications and changes in circumstances…. adaptation and constant learning/feedback is key on what to focus on next ;-)

In summary

Working out the important things in your life is relatively easy, it’s a natural way of grouping everything around what’s important.

Aggregating the the digital interactions around that important topic is somewhat harder.

Buzzy was created with this in mind… a free-form topic-centric flexible tool that will help people interact both privately and publicly and is easily adaptable. In our world, each important thing is a BUZZ.

Right now, we’re focused on allowing users to build and deploy flexible instant apps, that can easily adapt and can leverage technology like artificial intelligence to make focusing on an important thing easier.

Buzzy also allows you to control important factors like privacy, roles and capabilities, depending on the situation.

Have a crack, get your list of important things started today! www.buzzy.buzz