A downside of many information architectures is the reduction of data to items in queues that must be manually processed. Though information technology has saved the “knowledge work” generations from a lifetime of manual labor, we have our own assembly lines.
Here are the queues I process in a given work day:
- work email (by far the most insidious queue)
- personal email
- instant messages (they queue while in meetings and away from the computer)
- text messages
- missed phone calls and voicemail
- @replies on Twitter
- direct messages on Twitter
- requests for links to applications by Twitter API developers
- requests for whitelisting by Twitter developers
- code review requests
- tickets on our internal bug tracker
- tickets on the Twitter API tracker
- items in my personal to-do list
- calendar event requests
- unread items in my feed reader
- unread items in Instapaper
My suspicion is that there’s a market in making each and every one of those queues smaller, if not making them disappear entirely.