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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Today we have a guest post from Al at 7P Productions, it is a response to the article I wrote last week, “The End of the Information Age?” Al will be posting here from time to time to discuss his own GTD experience and share ideas on productivity and knowledge management.

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Saying that we are at the end of the Information Age is like saying global warming is ending because of the Toyota Prius.

Joe Andrieu argues that the Information Age, as we know it, is over and that a new age that emphasizes knowledge and expertise is replacing it. The response in HD BizBlog was that this isn’t an end of an age, but actually a transitioning into a more developed age of information and knowledge. I agree with this last point.

Let’s be clear on semantics: information is the processed results from raw data. Knowledge is putting information into context at a more macro level. If we are saying that the Information Age began in the 1980′s when information began to be rapidly propagated, then we have to acknowledge that a big part of it was the advent of the personal computer. It was not computers per se that produced information, but it was the humans that were empowered with the ability to generate information through documents, spreadsheets, and other software. Information in and of itself is useless unless it’s put into the context of knowledge, and the PC was the enabling technology that helped to transform raw data into information that can help facilitate knowledge.

Fast forward to today - it is now commonplace to have hundreds of emails in the inbox daily. There are 120,000 blogs created every day. Clearly, there exists information overload, and the only way to rise above the noise is the ability to add true knowledge. Information still needs to make an impact at the knowledge level, but the management of information is getting harder. This is evolution of the Information Age, not revolution.

That’s why I’m learning about Getting Things Done - this system was intended to help manage information saturation. However, GTD is very structured and process-oriented, which is a very “left-brain” approach, so it won’t really appeal to the right-brain type of crowd. I can see a new personal productivity evangelist that will have a system more suitable for the right-brain crowd and (s)he will be the next frequently recurring guest on Oprah.

To me, a revolution is the rest of the world eliminating the need to use fossil fuels. Or being able to use biological design to create artificial life that will be useful and effective for us. In all honesty, I think the first new revolution will be economic, since globalization is exacerbating the disparity between rich and poor and there will be a point where people will say enough is enough. However, with most other revolutions, the world is typically a better place in the end, and I know that I will be recording that revolution in high definition on my DVR.

For further discussion of Personal Knowledge Management and the future of Productivity Systems, please join the forum and share your thoughts.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6pvgm6. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen