Not-Standardized Project Management : IQTELL, Directory Opus, etc.

Posted by JBfrom
Nov 2, 2011 at 03:22 PM

You’ll forgive me if I respond to your thesis on the limits of simultaneous cognition: 3-4 vs 7-8, because I find the topic fascinating.

First of all, I agree with pretty much all your insights. We agree about how the brain works. I just disagree with part of your conclusions about how this impacts PIM design.

What’s actually happening when a brain interacts with a software presenting interacting information is far more complex than a simple attempt to simultaneously apprehend all the elements on the screen, as you acknowledge.

What you don’t mention is that in almost all situations simultaneous apprehension is overkill. Let’s say 3-4 is a practical limit. In a list of seven, it only takes a few passes to consider all groupings. And you can cut the number of passes down further by applying common sense heuristics.

Now I agree with you that deep nested outlines of 7-or-less are pretty useless for PRESENTING information.

However, the use case that you don’t address is the initial ORGANIZATION of that information.

For that, I think organically built nested outlines of 7-or-less is the ideal.

Reason being, you can gradually build a complete structure by making decisions involving no more than 7 on-screen elements at a time.

Once you’re done, you’ll need to distill it into a longform text to be human readable by someone who didn’t learn the material by building the outline himself. And you’ll need to distill it further into general principles or “hooks” and action points if you want to remember it and act upon it.

But the nested outline approach is by far the best way to bring structure to a big mess of text info.

And it can also be handy for refreshing yourself on specific topics, by diving deep into the outline branch that you need. Assuming you’re the one who built to outline.