Uncomplicating Life
It was just like any other day and I opened my mailbox to check who all were tying to ruin my beautiful morning by expecting me to work on their problems; to freak me out there were almost 200 emails waiting to be read and not surprisingly, most of them were of no use at all. More than eightscore of them were automated alerts which made no sense and could be completely avoided.
The first thought that crossed my mind was why do people complicate already overburdened lives; if only I had an answer!
I tried to convince them to do otherwise but all in vain, they believe alerts which are not to be acted upon are “informative”. Never in my whole life did I notice such a gross misuse of the word! Weather report for every minute is informative but do we really need that information?!
More often than not such notions are the result of ignorance (ignorance is not always bliss) of people who are not able to differentiate useful information from spam and unfortunately the world is not scarce of such people. In the e-age which runs on information, it is imperative to use common sense so as to efficiently manage the show. For situations like these I like the Unix way, it throws an alert only when something goes wrong; if there is no message, everything went well. Didn’t they say, “No news is good news!”
The worst part of information overdose is that it makes us prone to miss the important details. I believe in the KISS (Keep is Simple, Stupid) principle and life can be a lot easier if we use common sense to filter unnecessary things out of it.
P.S. the post is not aimed to disgrace a person in particular rather the ignorance is being challenged.
This can be transformed to the classic Manager-Engineer problem… Engineers don’t need what the managers call “Informative Alerts”… The next line of managers don’t need them either… But in an effort to showcase productivity (or call it value-for-money) to client, they end up implementing such things.. So can u really blame the manager for giving a clearance to have all these alerts in place?? YES.. To showcase his leadership skills and to get a nice presentation going on this, he insisted every damn thing that happens in the system to alerted. So shall we shoot the manager??? Most of us would be itching to say “yes, why the delay?” but we would not have got the work on the first place if it was not for some manager!!!! I guess we have to live with this…
Sandy
September 16, 2010 at 12:29 PM
Value for money for client?? I deleted all the mails without reading, some of them might be important and I’d have noticed had there be less of spam…now if you believe deleting everything without reading and putting outlook rules to filter mails is a value, I am good at it!
Leadership is good resources are rewarded for reducing manual work not the other way round, and if these leaders were not there resources would have enjoyed the job better and they’d not have concluded that “ppl leave the managers not the company”
rav
September 16, 2010 at 4:36 PM
Ahh.. how true! I have a folder titled “Unwanted complications” in which most of the alerts, job notifications, FYI emails end up in. People send all these emails only to create work for themselves and for others. It is a make-do world, where keeping it simple and stupid hardly finds place.
iniyaal
October 6, 2010 at 11:31 AM
those ppl should attend training session on how to classify information and how not to create more e-waste!
rav
October 6, 2010 at 9:08 PM