Email servers, business applications, social media sites—and whichever tools we may use for scheduling meetings and managing projects or approvals—are all delivering messages, updates, and streams of notifications to our congested inboxes. And while we are hopelessly inundated with inputs which in many cases don’t require our immediate response or action, we have no way of knowing whether we have missed something important—or if our contributions and requests received attention. So, this uninterrupted pouring of information is a source of constant distraction and anxiety.
Priority folders, filtering rules, and categorizations are some of the expedients that we use to try to isolate significant and essential information. Nevertheless, the existing tools seem quite ineffective when dealing with the volumes and complexity of today’s communication landscape.
In fact, importance cannot be discerned by shifting through the countless messages that have already reached our inboxes—most of which designated as high priority by the senders. That is because communication is a collaborative process, which cannot be managed and optimized unilaterally—from the point of view of the sender, or the receiver.
So, what can we do? The fact that we cannot prevent someone from submitting inputs that we are not interested in receiving, or invitations to meetings we don’t care attending, does not mean that we cannot control what enters our sphere of attention. What we need is a new approach.