The X1 Blog

Today marks the third annual celebration of Information Overload Awareness Day.  Believe it or not, there are no parades in the streets, no displays commemorating the event in the greeting card section of national stores and, sadly, no closed offices granting relief to overwhelmed office warriors.  It’s highly unlikely that many of the knowledge workers suffering under a deluge of emails and digital information even know that such a day exists. 

But the problem, although often difficult to quantify or articulate, is real.  It exists for the vast majority of us dealing in the information trade, and exacts significant pain across both large multinational corporations and small businesses.  According to Basex, the average knowledge worker receives 93 emails per day, with information overload ultimately costing the U.S. economy almost $1 trillion.  A 2009 report from Deloitte, which we covered here, estimated daily sent messages at an average of more than 160 per worker.  IDC’s extensive research shows an average of 13 hours per week spent managing email and a whopping 9 hours per week just searching through information. 

So what is the solution?  We’ve spent the last 8 years at X1 addressing this issue, and all we can say with certainty is that there are no silver bullets.  While we’ve advocated hoarding digital information, it is difficult to argue with the core recommendation from Basex on Information Overload Day: we should all take more care in reading and responding to email.  Today’s professionals too often breeze through detailed correspondence without taking the necessary time to understand the details and, perhaps more importantly, reflect on the appropriate response. 

Our work at X1 has repeatedly pointed to a problem with us, as individuals, recreating work.  In other words, the best answer to a contract dispute, customer issue, or engineering dilemma often exists within our own inbox.  We depend so heavily on digital communications to solve our problems that we often forget that we’ve solved these same problems before – repeatedly.  Unfortunately, we don’t have total recall – the human brain, while an amazing machine, is not perfect.  There is an incredible amount of intellectual capital, reflecting massive labor costs, lying dormant in email inboxes, antiquated file structures, and shared repositories. 

So today, on the day celebrating both our dependence on digital information and the agony it causes us, we advocate the following in our continual quest to improve productivity: we should all take care to produce less trivial information while simultaneously recognizing the valuable treasure trove of information that already exists, often ready to be rediscovered in just a few key strokes.

Earlier today we announced a huge step forward for X1 Mobile Search.  Previously, X1 Mobile Search required an installation of the X1 Professional Client on the desktop.  With this latest release, X1 Mobile Search allows users to search either their PC or Mac from an iPhone or iPad, for FREE, with no installation of the X1 Professional Client required.  Here is an excerpt from the press release:

X1 Technologies today announced a major update to X1 Mobile Search, featuring “Fast-as-you-Type™” search of desktop bound email and documents.  With X1 Mobile Search, users can turn their iPhones and iPads into an extension of their PC or Mac, allowing them to leave their laptop behind.  X1 will be demonstrating the new app at Pepcom’s MobileFocus Event today in San Diego.

Traditional remote access tools allow users to view their desktops, however, these tools require the user to know exactly where the information exists.  X1 Mobile Search, previously $19.99 is now available for free in the App Store and allows users to instantly find information, without having to navigate through the folders on their desktop.  In addition to working in conjunction with X1 Professional on the desktop, X1 Mobile Search now works natively with Windows and Mac.

“X1 Mobile Search allows access to your computer’s files from anywhere, and will instantly find exactly what you’re looking for,” said Christopher Walton, vice president of products and strategy at X1. “With this release, we’re making it easier for users to find and manipulate files, regardless of where they reside on the desktop, or what desktop solution they’re using.  Whether they use our X1 Professional Client, Windows Search or Mac Spotlight, X1 Mobile Search will now work for them.  Additionally, our security features make it an ideal solution for busy professionals who need to quickly access and manage data, without having to take their laptops everywhere.” 

The entire release, including details on the features and benefits, can be found here.

So, what’s behind our decision to drop the price from $19.99 to free?  Quite simply, the explosive growth of smartphones and tablet PC’s coupled with the extended connectivity of our mobile product.  As the New York Times detailed last month, professionals are increasingly reliant on smartphones and tablets, largely iPhones and iPads, to accomplish critical tasks and boost their productivity.  While we believe that the X1 Professional Client can benefit any Windows user in the world, the unfortunate reality is that not everyone in the world has a copy of X1 installed on their desktop.  It is our vision to create products that instantly connect people to the right information from any device, and today’s announcement opens up our solution to an entirely new class of users.  Since X1 Mobile Search now supports both Windows Search and Mac Spotlight for free, it is our express intent to lower the barrier for anyone seeking remote access to their PC or Mac.  Extending our support to the native operating indices on the desktop was the first step, and support of Android and Windows Mobile devices will come next.  While we do plan to offer a Pro Tier in the future that provides tighter integration for users of both the X1 Professional Client and X1 Mobile Search, we hope that today’s release introduces a new group of iPad and iPhone users to the X1 community.

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Our CEO, John Waller, recently participated in a Bloomberg Businessweek debate regarding the ‘health’ of storing digital information.  It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone in the X1 community that we consider ‘e-hoarding’ to be intelligent, especially for people employing a fast retrieval tool like the X1 Professional Client!  Here is the text from John’s argument:

In an age of ever-increasing computing power and ever-decreasing storage costs, is there really any harm in ignoring the delete button? The bottom line is the volume of information isn’t the issue; findability is. If you can find whatever you’re looking for instantaneously, the total volume of information stored doesn’t matter.

We can draw an analogy to the greater Web. The size of the Web continues to grow exponentially, but it causes no problem, because Google has solved the findability problem. We don’t wish for fewer Web pages out there. Instead, we care about finding the right Web page in the shortest amount of time. No matter how much we obsess about creating and organizing our bookmarks, in almost all cases, searching Google is the shortest route to the best answer.

Heavy users of e-mail see upwards of 200 to 300 messages per day. Add documents, spreadsheets, and presentations and this number balloons. How does the average professional know what will not prove to be valuable information months and years later?

As businesses continue to use e-mail as the primary form of communication, keeping a digital trail of conversations and documents is critical, making deletion an increasingly irresponsible action. Findability remains the key, and today’s impressive search and retrieval tools for e-mail and personal files make virtually any digital information available with just a few keystrokes.

The opposing viewpoint and commentary can be found here.

We’ve republished a few blog posts from 2010 below that touch on this subject matter. 

(Originally posted May 27, 2010)

In reading Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s great book Total Recall, there were certain passages that struck us as directly relevant to the problems that we are trying to solve here at X1.  Granted, the MyLifeBits project is a fascinating and ambitious study that we won’t try to reduce to a few words in our blog post here!  Much simpler, some of the language is virtually identical to what we hear from our users on a daily basis.  Total Recall imagines a time when we have a full digital record of our entire life, in minute detail.  The authors’ stress that such “e-memory” is less intensive than what we are limited to by nature as it allows us to rely on limited pieces of recollection, with confidence that the full corpus of information attached to the recollection is immediately retrievable with just a few key strokes. 

The X1 Professional Client, from its very beginning, was architected to address the “findability” problem, with the important presumption that task-oriented search of personal information is fundamentally different than searching the web.  Heavy users of email see upwards of 200-300 emails per day, and typically receive even more as members of distribution lists.  What is it that our memory catches and holds onto months and years later?  Is it a random, but significant word of text within the body of the email?  A net present value figure within an excel attachment?  Or perhaps it’s simply the sender’s last name and a faint idea that the information was sent at some point in late 2008. 

It has always been our opinion that the speed of a business-related search, at an end-user level, is paramount – precisely because of the way our minds are trained to recall information.  The application must be architected to allow the individual to wheel and pivot during the search, refine mid-typing, sort on various fields, and drill down where necessary.  In short, a search experience that effectively renders the file tree approach to information retrieval irrelevant.  We spoke with a long-time X1 user yesterday who lamented the process of setting up a folder file structure for a co-worker in conjunction with a new initiative at work.  “I haven’t had to rely on folders for years – there is simply no need to do so with X1.  I had forgotten how archaic and time-consuming a process it is.” 

The “E-Memory Revolution” that Gordon and Jim write about is certainly upon us, and there is no shortage of revolutionary and complex products and technologies currently available to help us deal with the overwhelming stream of information we face in today’s world.  What do you think?  How do you remember the incredibly valuable communications and work product produced in both your current and prior jobs?

(Originally posted May 7, 2010)

Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece in the New York Times last week, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint”, was at one point mid-week the most read and emailed article on nytimes.com.  While the focus of the article was the U.S. military’s reliance on PowerPoint, response in the comments section and throughout the blogosphere quickly shifted to a more general discussion of its overall utility.  Suffice to say, Microsoft’s presentation application is so deeply embedded in corporate workflow and culture that any commentary generates a fair amount of reaction, both positive and negative.   Candidly, this is no different than the typical chatter we hear within X1 on a daily basis, both from our customers and our own workforce.  We are heavily dependent on PowerPoint for a full spectrum of uses, from internal meetings to analyst presentations to board meetings.   

As David Silverman stated in his response to the article on the HBR blog, PowerPoint presentations are typically “distributed far and wide” after the initial creation and meeting, leading to an instinct to cram a massive amount of information in each deck.   The result?  There is a ton of corporate IP sitting dormant in PowerPoint archives, both as attachments in email inboxes and within personal folders on individual employees’ computers.  Think of the time it takes to create just a single PowerPoint presentation, and the corresponding salary costs necessary to support this time.  Now multiply this figure hundreds, if not thousands, of times to address each new presentation and corresponding round of edits.  Multiply again over the thousands of individual employees working with PowerPoint in a large organization.  Pretty large figure, right?

This is precisely the type of problem that X1 was specifically architected to address.    As a result of the inevitability of information overload, “findability” is the key to unlocking the valuable information stashed away in email inboxes and disparate file folders.  Our product’s interface allows an individual to sort on a file type, here .ppt, and find an updated result set with each keystroke, all with a full preview of the PowerPoint presentation directly next to the search results.  We will not debate the value of PowerPoint (we use it a ton) nor will we take issue with the argument that it is overused.  It is difficult to argue, however, with the incredible amount of thought and analysis sitting in PowerPoint presentations scattered throughout the typical organization.  And it’s just as hard to argue that PowerPoint will be going away anytime soon. 

Is your organization doing everything you can to capture this latent IP?   Download a free trial of the X1 Professional Client and discover the helpful data and analysis in long-forgotten PowerPoint slides in your inbox and files.

(Originally posted March 24, 2010)

According to a 2009 report from Deloitte:

“During 2009, on average office workers are expected to send more than 160 messages daily and check their inboxes more than 50 times, in all dedicating up to two hours each day to email.”

With an average of 160 message sent daily, information is becoming increasingly staggered. The days of lengthy, thought-out emails are gone. Today, most emails are short, individual thoughts, sent when they reach top-of-mind. What this means is that potentially important information can easily be lost in long email threads or simply pushed out of view in your inbox.  

Due to increases in server space and companies allocating more memory for emails, the impetus to clean out our inboxes has disappeared. Everything can be kept, but with that increased freedom comes the herculean task of finding the right email at the right time.

Leo Babauta at Zen Habits is still a proponent of purging the inbox and minimizing the amount of emails you’re left with by using structured organization methods. But how do you know what you’re NOT going to need? The best solution is to organize, add more metadata, and refrain from deleting potentially valuable information. By putting your emails in folders, flagging tasks, and adding items to lists you increase the ways in which you can search and consequently find the message you’re looking for.  Of course, many X1 users have abandoned the practice of putting emails and documents into a folder structure because they can always “X1 it” to find exactly what they are looking for, regardless of its location!

(Originally posted March 10, 2010)

As the world of computer and computing powers develop, they are bound by two laws that are working against your productivity. These laws allow you to save and have access to every email you ever send and every file you ever create, while eliminating the need to delete anything. The first is Moore’s law and the se cond is Kryder’s law.

Moore’s law is concerned with hardware and processing power while Kryder’s law addresses storage issues. Together they predict the continual growth and development of computers. 

What does this mean for you? In the very near future – within the next few years even – the digital landscape, be it a personal computers or cloud computing, may offer more processing power and storage than most single users could possibly ever use.

In 1965 Intel’s cofounder, Gordon Moore, published a paper stating that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years. There is no upper limit to Moore’s law – the number of transistors on a circuit will never cease to increase.  Since 1965 Moore’s observation has proven absolutely true.

Years later came a hard drive heavy weight, Mark Kryder, who fathered his own law. Kryder’s law is like a rocket car to Moore’s horse and buggy. Mark Kryder is credited as providing the impetus for the amazing 1,000-fold increase in hard drive space over the past 15 years, easily deserving the honor of being Kryder’s law’s namesake. Kryder’s law explains the continual growth in storage bits on a hard drive. His goal is to affordably get a terabyte worth of storage on a single square-inch magnet hard drive.   

Together, these two laws describe the upward trajectory of computing power and storage. The problem is that as storage becomes larger and cheaper, we are presented with less incentive to stay organized and encouraged – a la Gmail – to never delete anything ever again.  You might already find yourself holding on to files and emails you never would have kept even 3 years ago, just because you can.

As computers and servers become archives for everything you’ve ever done on a computer, we’re faced with increased challenges to find everything. We download attachments to different folders, accidentally save things in the wrong place, and spend more time than it’s worth tracking down rogue files in the endless warehouse that our computers have become.

It is important to create a digital business environment that is accessible not only to a single user, but also to any users that might be brought on in the future. When making your decision to store data locally, on a server, or in the cloud, consider how easy it will be to find a single item in a vast data system. This is a key consideration especially if you work with a number of people, collaborating using the same files and information, as more and more information will amass on your hard drives very quickly. 

The question is: With everything at your fingertips, will your work flow slow you down?