I returned today from a few days off. A few meaning barely three days, not a real vacation by any means. Even in that small amount of time I managed to accumulate enough emails to require several hours of culling and triaging. Ah yes, the promise of the digital world where we’re all optimized and empowered by the digital communication tools at hand.

I hate to piss on anyone’s parade with my seemingly luddite rants but this sucks. All we’ve done is flip the funnel. In communications, the burden used to be on the sender. You had to write a letter, buy a stamp, walk to the post office, or at the very least pick up the phone. If I didn’t answer you had to leave a message or try calling back. It made you think twice about what it was you were communicating because it took time out of your day to do so. The result being that you performed more triage on your end. Ah, maybe I don’t need to talk to him about that, or maybe I’ll just mention it when we see each other next month?

Now that we’ve flipped the funnel and made it too easy to send communications, the sender has little to no burden. Send, send, send, cc, bcc away and let the receiver to the filtering. This same problem exists in digital photography. In the olden days, you had to take your film in, drop it off for processing, pick it up, and most importantly pay for it. With digital photography, you no longer have to worry about whether you’ve got the right shot. Shoot it ten times and worry about it later. Well when’s later? All that filtering, editing, and processing is now flipped as you accumulate thousands of digital pictures you have to ‘go through’ some day.

Maybe I should start charging ten cents to the sender for every email I read through?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 1:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.