Sunday, March 5, 2017
Dealing with communication overload in a corporate setting
Dealing with communication overload in a corporate setting
I absolutely fucking LOVE this movie. But unfortunately for me, twenty years after the movies release, (just 6 years shy of the date in the movie) we are living in the not-quite-so-dystopian-yet-still-kinda-shitty future predicted in the film. And while nobody is running around with cybernetic enhancements or digital memory augmentation brain implants, they did get one key thing right in this movie: information overload will be the death of you.
In the movie, that statement is taken absolutely literally and constant bombardment of external stimulus input eventually causes a neurological disorder called "Nerve Attenuation Syndrome" or simply "NAS" (which, in my line of work means "Network Attached Storage", ironically is a common remedy to information overload on hard drives. hmmm...) which causes the victim to suffer potentially life threatening seizures, a phenomenon referred to in the movie as "The Black Shakes".
A few years ago during the death throes of the MySpace empire, when Facebook was rapidly taking a commanding lead in the Social Networking race, I at one point had a Yahoo account, an AIM account, a Gmail account, a MySpace account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and the list goes on and on. I started to feel so overwhelmed by the incessant barrage of emails I was getting, both from legitimate sources and in the form of spam, as my "free" email accounts had been whored out around the Internet to every advertising firm in existence. I tried many things at first, creating folders and rules to manage my emails, and then subfolders and subrules to try and create some order from the chaos, but it just became even more complicated and difficult. Eventually, I found myself at my wits end with the situation, when I came across a solution: a concept I encountered a few years ago called "Inbox Zero", which I stumbled across on YouTube. https://youtu.be/z9UjeTMb3Yk
A brief rundown of the Inbox Zero concept; Inbox Zero is an extremely aggressive approach to managing your inbox, where the goal is to maintain zero -or as close to it as possible- emails in your inbox at all times. The process of sifting through the years worth of accumulated debris is a bit time consuming, especially if you are a serial social networking user. You have to take the approach you would take to cleaning out a loved ones home after theyve passed away. You need to look at each piece of mail and be brutally honest as you ask yourself: can I live without this? Youll find that nearly 100% of the time, the answer is unequivocally yes. If you have information you need to hold on to for historical purposes, like tax information for example, that is not something that belongs in your inbox, nor does it belong in the cloud. You should have a hard copy in a Manilla file folder locked up securely somewhere at your residence for safe keeping, or at the very least in an encrypted file on your computer. Sensitive material just doesnt belong in the cloud, and it certainly doesnt belong in your inbox. Dont believe me? Just ask every unfortunate girl that had pictures of their snatch plastered all over the Internet after the massive iCloud breach earlier this year (the "Fappening"). Basically, if you dont want anyone else to get their hands on it, dont leave it online! Its that simple.
If someone sent you some pictures you want to hang on to, download them! Import them into iPhoto. Upload them to your Google Drive. They dont belong in your inbox. See, people have this nasty habit of doing really stupid shit like emailing important documents to themselves, and then leaving them there, eating up space in their inbox indefinitely. Thats what cloud storage or a thumb drive is for. In this day and age when everyone carries around a cell phone with storage capacity that dwarfs that of even some computers or recent vintage, theres no excuse for abusing your inbox by cramming it full of attachments that should be stored in another fashion. I always say use the right tool for the job; although email protocols have been extended over the years to support many types of media, more and more businesses (my employer included) have very aggressive security policies in place that arbitrarily block attachments that are anything but plain text documents. If you have projects you need to collaborate on, your company should have some locally attached network storage where you and your team keep such documents. If you need to access that storage outside of your work network, thats what VPN is for. Using your email as cloud storage or a file server is a bit like trying to drive in nails with a wrench. Sure it can be accomplished, but again, use the right tool for the job.
So after months of battling with my email, I have found my salvation. Ive started a similar campaign to Inbox Zero that I call "antisocial networking". Not only have I swung the axe wide on what is already in my inbox, but I started to kill the problem at the source. I started pairing down, closing accounts that I dont use. I used websites like justdelete.me and started a seek and destroy campaign to reduce my footprint on the Internet, eradicating dozens of old accounts for things like music streaming services I dont use, forums Im not active on, image/file hosting websites, and destroying virtually all social networking accounts, including what I consider to be the holy grail of unplugging- actually deleting my Facebook account.
I apologize for getting sidetracked here, but I feel like this needs to be said. For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that its simply not possible to actually delete a Facebook account, rather that you can only deactivate it. But then in my search to purge my existence from the Internet I came across Facbeooks best kept secret. You CAN delete your account. There just is no link to the page to do it anywhere on Facebook, nor can you find the page by doing any amount of Google searching. The only way to access the page is type the URL in directly, and its so brain dead simple I cant believe that this isnt common knowledge, but at any rate, here it is
https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
Now where was I... So there I was, happily reading and subsequently deleting maybe 5-10 emails a day, now that I was no longer a slave to social networking. And that was all well and good, but then about a half a year ago I got a huge promotion to a new team within my company, and unfortunately for me, everyone --EVERYONE-- on this team lives and dies by their email. Im constantly finding myself bombarded with errant emails. And theres always that one asshole who has to hit reply all to every fucking email. Every. Single. One. Im constantly getting alerts on my phone with one sentence messages between two people carrying on a conversation that has absolutely nothing to do with me. I apologize now for going on a rant here, but two things must be said. First and foremost, before you click that send button, you really should ask yourself
"Is this something that would be better suited for Lync/Skype?" Simple criteria for this: is this an extremely time sensitive matter? Is this something that can be asked in a single sentence?
and secondly, you need to consider what "email" actually is. It is the digital replacement of actual mail. As in letters. Professional correspondence. You use it for communication when a paper trail needs to be established. Usually of an official or semi-official nature. Things like punctuation, spelling, grammar, and professional etiquette should be taking into consideration before drafting up an email. There is actually a proper format for email, and I find it appalling how few people in the very tech savvy and professional environment in which I work do not seem to get that.
Essentially, if its something that you would otherwise type up, proof read, print, neatly fold and seal in an envelope, apply postage and drop off at the post office, consider yourself blessed with the ability to cut out a huge amount of administration in the process, but dont forget to mind your Ps and Qs. And for Gods sake, dont include any emoji in your message. Where is your sense of professionalism? If the word vomit your about to spew into a few dozen peoples inboxes doesnt meet all of the above criteria, then please have a little decency and just send someone an IM.
In a corporate setting where the standard practice is to just indiscriminately rape the inboxes of every member of your team every time you have a half formed thought enter your head, what can you really do about it? Honestly, not a whole hell of a lot. Theres virtually nothing you can do to change the culture. Especially when you have members on your team that seem to hold a polar opposite stance, openly flaunting basic email etiquette (like forgetting to turn off caps lock in between doing data entry into an excel spreadsheet and firing off rogue emails. I dont enjoy being yelled at, do you?) and publicly praising other members of the team for "how well they communicate" as my goddamn inbox gets serially spammed with another 10-15 pointless emails over something that could have and should have been a private conversation.
The best Ive been able to come up with is to create an "Important" folder in my inbox, and anything that falls under that category gets triaged there as soon as it hits my inbox. Everything else gets round filed the second I see it. I try to set aside 10-15 min per day to respond to the "important" stuff" each day, and then I archive my inbox once a week. Its not perfect, but it goes a long way towards keeping my head out of my inbox and in the task at hand.
At work I dont have the luxury of "inbox zero". And while Im not going to develop a case of "the black shakes" from 76 emails Ive received already this morning, it is enough to give me a nervous tick. Im willing to bet money that if my company runs like this, there are hundreds of thousands of other companies out there that suffer from the same kind of problems, and Id be willing to bet that consulting firms out there will stand to make a lot of money in the near future as the current system of information management (or lack thereof) slowly degrades into inevitable entropy and chaos.
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