IA blog

Part of the “5 Minutes a Day” blog series

As I sit here, listening to the usual pounding of the construction next door (which has been going on for about a year now), the thought came to me. Noise (not surprising). Noise, I thought, there seems to be so much of it in the world. In both the IA profession and outside of it.

In the IA and UX world there is the noise of what we should be doing versus what is being done successful. There is the noise of what should we call ourselves and who sees us as what, and the noise of what our profession is becoming. Not all of this discussion is noise, of course, but much of it is a distraction from real progress. This noise can become frustrating, and so loud that our brains stop thinking effectively about the points and questions that really matter.

Outside of our professions we all deal with Noise all the time. How I am defining noise here is not the usual day to day sounds of annoyance (like my good friends next door), but it’s the thinking noise that fills up valuable space in our heads like the worrying about our commute or the anxiety about what our boss will think of our work or even the big anxieties surrounding the meaning of our lives and where they are going.

My goal for today is to start to parse out the different between noise and meaning. As an IA, it is my job to bring meaning, to make the unclear clear, and thus I aim to bring more of this to my own life as well. To filter out the noise, so that more meaning can be exposed, that is the key!