I found simple law in PoIC. This is about scale of Task Force v.s. its frequency. I measured scale of task force for writing index cards, blog, and wiki, and how many time I organize Task Force (=frequency, f). I found the distribution of scale is nearly 1/f. The PoIC follows power law, one of fundamental law in nature.
You may hear about Long Tail somewhere, before. According to Wikipedia, the Long Tail had been proposed to explain business model of successful Amazon.com. An 80% of “less important matter” is much more important than 20% of “important matter” in internet shopping. This is also true for success of Apple’s iTMS.
Further, the Long Tail phenomena is understood as one of the “power law” case. So the PoIC and Long Tail is connected through power law, the language of nature. PoIC follower believe “less important is more important” intuitively as we capture and accumulate all “tiny”, apparently less important ideas using fieldnote and index cards. Or maybe remind David Allen’s “great habit of collection”. Now we can say this rules-of-thumb in PoIC is right as we see in the successes of Amazon.com and iTMS. Nature rules.
Not only about the Task Force, but also a distribution of Four Cards seems follow the Long Tail. I had written this article without paying attention to the Long Tail. The dots are connected now. The number of Discovery Card dominates 81.2% of my index cards @ home. This results can be understood as “80% of less important Discovery is more important in personal productivity.” This sounds somewhat paradoxical, but true. In fact, if I don’t have a tracking system like PoIC, all tiny discovery disappeared into darkness.
In this article, I showed only two examples of the Long Tail phenomena in PoIC currently I found. I think there are more such rules in index cards productivity. Have you found such curious “Mushrooms” in your system?
