Victus Spiritus

Actionable vs. Interesting Information

The distinguishing quality of actionable information is that it must be something we can act on in our immediate future. Action isn’t exclusively limited by:

• building something
• making money
• disrupting something

It could be

• disseminating further info
• improving information system speed
• adding valuable descriptive (or meta) information to existing data

In contrast, interesting information we are drawn to now, but may not be actionable until some later unforseen time. Then there’s the last bin of not interesting, nor actionable information (noise or spam), which we all try to steer clear from.

Our social graph or network loosely bounds one channel for our actionable information input. Serendipity has a way of sending actionable information in our direction as we’re taking action or researching other areas.

Needle in the Haystack

Tools that aid in our search for relevant actionable information while we’re productive transcend boosting our effectiveness. In addition they’ll even help us when we’re just reading or learning for fun. Social Media has driven the information flood to our doorsteps. Scanning hundreds of blogs, articles, and video topics suggested by friends, becomes a dangerous time sink even when our friends share our interests.

Myself and others are actively working on tools to help discover actionable and interesting information and discern between the two based on a user’s past social media usage, blogging, digital shadow. We not only want to filter the noise but to classify new data as immediately important versus something of interest that we may consume at our leisure.

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written by Mark Essel \\ tags: Decision making, design theory, leadership, search, web/tech