As a meme master, I'm always excited to share my latest finds with friends and family. It's my way of spreading happiness throughout the world, one silly graphic at a time. The problem is however was sometimes people would tell me they've seen it already. I'm not sure why but it infuriated me. How could you selfishly dismiss all the effort I've put in to creating this carefully curated portfolio of pictorial masterpieces. It feels like an unnecessary wasteful response that at best adds no value, and at worse annoys the recipient.
The other place this happens a lot is at work when people respond to mass emails. Imagine an FYI email to notify all staff that it's someone's birthday. And then the reply all's start to pour in. And then the responses reminding people not to reply all come in, then the reply all apologies start to come in. In minutes your inbox explodes with unread mail that you have to sift through to determine if there is any useful info. The risk now is you can assume it's just a useless thread and delete all, but unfortunately some nugget is caught up somewhere within the chaos.
With modern instant one to one communication, this problem is exponentially more difficult to manage. We share info not just with multiple people, but over multiple mediums, and in effect generate 'tonnes' of information waste. The catch is that we don't know whether that alert/ping/buzz is waste or not until we check it, causing us to waste lots of time and increase stress levels.
To take control we need to understand our information sources and understand where the overlap occurs. Once we understand this we can more effectively manage where and how we take information in.
Do you know when to reply all, one or none??
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