From time to time I browse Kindle books that are available for free download, and acquire them. However it’s often many months, sometimes years before I actually read them. One such book is ‘Bit Literacy’, which Amazon tells me I downloaded in April 2011. I had not heard of the author, Mark Hurst, and it’s only in my recent travels that the title intrigued me, and I read the whole book on a flight.
That is to say, I read the introduction and the first couple of chapters in full. After that, I started to skim, and towards the end skipped several sections. But the opening part of the book intrigued me, as did the theme of the book - that of taking control of our Internet and other computer usage, rather than getting caught up in browsing, endless emails, and files randomly all over our computers.
I found the style and some of the terminology rather dated, but I gather this book was written in 2007, so perhaps it’s not surprising. The author starts by explaining in very broad terms that computers function in ‘bits’ and that while they have many advantages of paper, it’s easy to get sucked in, overwhelmed and unable to escape. The book was written before social media, which is probably the worst culprit nowadays, so I find it intriguing that the author could see this problem happening fourteen years ago.
Given that there’s a helpful chapter about being succinct, and making points clearly without repetition, I found it a tad ironic that the first three chapters essentially say the same thing: we need to be ‘bit literate’, as the author puts it, or we’re in danger of letting the ‘bits’ (by which he means anything computer-related) control us. One chapter, I felt, would have sufficed as an introduction.
However the chapter that struck me most strongly was the fourth one which recommends keeping one’s email box (or boxes) empty. Not just under control, with a few emails waiting to respond to, but empty. Every day. As I read this, I thought about my inbox, which I knew had about forty or fifty emails with messages I needed to respond to… some time. And it doesn’t happen. I knew, too, that my ‘social’ and ‘promotional’ tabs in gmail were also rather crowded. I had deleted a lot, but was subscribed to too many alerts and newsletters - something which the author recommends removing unless one is certain to read them.
The following chapter suggests using a tool which the author had created called ‘GooToDo’, that would allow emails to be sent to a to-do list, with relevant dates, if they are not going to be processed that day - thus enabling people to answer personal emails (which he recommends doing first, each morning), delete spam or those unlikely to be read, and then move others to this to-do list, where they would appear only on the allocated day. I liked this idea very much.
On the other hand, I don’t see the point of deleting sent mail, or clearing out archived mail. I’m sure I won’t ever read most of it again, but occasionally I’ve delved into messages from a decade or more ago. And with free or inexpensive mail storage, I don’t find archived mail at all overwhelming.
The rest of the book isn’t so helpful; I already limit my news reading online to four sites, and usually only skim the headlines, reading just one or two articles each day. My photos are already fairly well organised, with a system such as the author suggests. And his recommended Windows software, Picasa, is - sadly - no longer available. I don’t tend to browse blogs, and while it’s certainly possible to get caught up in sites, following links, I’m reasonably good about not doing that. Social media is the easiest place to get lost, and since that isn’t addressed in the book, I didn’t gain much from the rest of it.
There are chapters about the importance of touch typing; I already touch type, and have done so since I was about twelve so I’m not likely to adopt a different keyboard, as the author suggests. I appreciated his suggestions about writing emails, but there was nothing new or revolutionary about the ideas. And I simply skimmed rapidly over the recommendations (which seemed rather obvious to me) of naming files and keeping them organised in folders. I was somewhat interested in the Mac vs Windows appendix, although, again, nothing really new. Perhaps I’m already mostly bit-literate.
But the chapter about email stayed with me, and the day after I arrived home I set to work to clear out my mailboxes. I discovered that the ‘GooToDo’, (now ‘GoodToDo) software is not free, and looked a tad over-complex for my requirements. But, to my surprise, I discovered a little button in Gmail allowing me to ‘snooze’ emails - pushing them into the future, where they vanish from my inbox until the day I plan to deal with them. Using this tool, and following the author’s other suggestions, I cleared out my email boxes within just a few hours.
So while the book is undoubtedly dated, and over-wordy in places, I would recommend it in a low-key way if you’re feeling overwhelmed by ‘bits’, and if you can find a free or inexpensive way of downloading it. I found it useful because of the challenge of reducing email clutter, and aiming for empty inboxes at the end of each day. If you don’t know a lot about how computers function, or have photos all over your hard drive, or files with unhelpful names, then some of the suggestions made in other chapters may also be relevant. The explanations are clear without too much technical jargon, even if rather repetitive at times.
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