> It seems to be rooted in the fact that these days people skim text, rather than read what is written. I don't know if it's because of general information overload, or a lack of attention to detail, or if the mindless scrolling of phone apps has trained us that visual impressions of words are good enough.
One aspect is that it's a parasitic efficiency increase. The 80/20 rule applies here; you can answer 80% of the emails by skimming. If you just don't handle, or poorly handle, the 20% of the emails that take 80% of the time, you get a bunch of time back.
I also think that the overload comes from notifications, not general information. We get a crazy number of notifications from our personal devices (and many/most people check them), and during the work day that's compounded with all the systems at work that send notifications. I think that we've subconsciously taught people to work between the notifications. It can feel like if you don't respond to them in real time then you might end up with an insurmountable backlog of notifications to handle, so people have acclimated to handling them in real time. Each time someone responds to an IM, a mental timer starts, counting down how long it is until it thinks the next notification might come. Or, conversely, you're in a notification lull, and you start thinking this is your only time to get anything done towards the sprint, so you smash out fast responses to the notifications you do get, trying not to break your train of thought.
Others may have different experiences, but I get notifications from so many systems and people that it can be overwhelming. And the tools we are offered to manage it suck. Slack's notification settings are better than what I had before with Lync, but they're still lackluster. Email has the best filtering record so far, but it is also by far the most abused by tools.
Some things I would love to see in a chat system:
* Chat and notification filters based on whether the user is a bot or not
* A sane "handle this later" queue or some kind of integration with a task manager to let me click to create a ticket
* A way to communicate busy-ness through my status. Either a level I can manually set, or a system that can guesstimate it (i.e. "curryst has 8 active private chats right now") so we can all gauge whether what we need is that important right now
* Customizable options to batch notifications. I would love it if I could have Slack batch my notifications and just send me one notification per minute that says "3 new messages"
My holy grail is if they would let me write my own functions to determine whether to notify for an event, batch it into the next batched notification, or to not alert at all. Most of these desktop clients are in Electron anyways, just let me pass it a path to a Javascript file that exports functions to filter notifications.
One aspect is that it's a parasitic efficiency increase. The 80/20 rule applies here; you can answer 80% of the emails by skimming. If you just don't handle, or poorly handle, the 20% of the emails that take 80% of the time, you get a bunch of time back.
I also think that the overload comes from notifications, not general information. We get a crazy number of notifications from our personal devices (and many/most people check them), and during the work day that's compounded with all the systems at work that send notifications. I think that we've subconsciously taught people to work between the notifications. It can feel like if you don't respond to them in real time then you might end up with an insurmountable backlog of notifications to handle, so people have acclimated to handling them in real time. Each time someone responds to an IM, a mental timer starts, counting down how long it is until it thinks the next notification might come. Or, conversely, you're in a notification lull, and you start thinking this is your only time to get anything done towards the sprint, so you smash out fast responses to the notifications you do get, trying not to break your train of thought.
Others may have different experiences, but I get notifications from so many systems and people that it can be overwhelming. And the tools we are offered to manage it suck. Slack's notification settings are better than what I had before with Lync, but they're still lackluster. Email has the best filtering record so far, but it is also by far the most abused by tools.
Some things I would love to see in a chat system: * Chat and notification filters based on whether the user is a bot or not * A sane "handle this later" queue or some kind of integration with a task manager to let me click to create a ticket * A way to communicate busy-ness through my status. Either a level I can manually set, or a system that can guesstimate it (i.e. "curryst has 8 active private chats right now") so we can all gauge whether what we need is that important right now * Customizable options to batch notifications. I would love it if I could have Slack batch my notifications and just send me one notification per minute that says "3 new messages"
My holy grail is if they would let me write my own functions to determine whether to notify for an event, batch it into the next batched notification, or to not alert at all. Most of these desktop clients are in Electron anyways, just let me pass it a path to a Javascript file that exports functions to filter notifications.