Butterfield: Search-centric tools drastically lower cognitive cost compared to manual filing
Stuart Butterfield · a16z Podcast | Tools for How We Work Today · Jan 2, 2019 · at 15:28
Stuart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack, compares the productivity shift from manually sorting emails into folders to searching across unorganized archives like Gmail and Slack.
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“Where it wasn't just the fact that you could search for the messages and find them again after, which obviously is very important, but the cognitive cost of processing incoming messages fell through the floor in comparison to a world where you had to manually choose the folder in which you'd file something away. Suddenly it didn't really matter. You could just throw it all in one big pile. You could archive messages willy-nilly, because you knew that if you ever needed to find them again, the search was good enough that you'd be able to.”
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