The Problem of Communication
If no one is listening, that’s a problem! Too often we communicate too much, but new AI tools are going make it easier to keep in touch.
In this day and age we are more connected with each other than ever before, yet it’s almost cliché to say that the same technology which has brought us together has also driven us apart.
The problem with communication is that there is such a thing as too much communication. It used to be that you only communicated the most essential information to only the people who really needed to know it.
Now it’s so easy to communicate far and wide that people have lost their natural filters; people are sending everything to everyone, and instead of informing us it’s having the opposite effect. It’s gotten to the point that people who share photos of their lunch on Facebook or Instagram are joked about the way we used to joke about airline food; more seriously, this over-sharing happens in the workplace too.
At work we are often confronted with a mountain of communication, most of it either irrelevant or otherwise not immediately important. Out of necessity, we’re being trained to ignore communication entirely. Otherwise we’d never get any work done at all. This is destroying the great advantage that the last 20 years of development has brought us: ease of communication.
Although all communication is “instant” these days, sometimes slowing things down is what’s needed. Too often I end up playing a game of ping-pong with my teammates, bouncing messages back and forth, fiddling around on minor details, when it could all be solved by one deliberately composed email, or a single phone call, or, if absolutely necessary, a meeting. Looking at every person’s calendar and making deliberate decisions takes time but it is still quicker, often, than doing it by trial and error.
Another problem is the sheer number of different communication platforms these days. They exist for good reasons of course; Gmail, Slack, SMS texts, Facebook messages are different platforms and that’s the way we like it!
Often we like being able to keep different means of communicating separate because we are often communicating with different sets of people.
But this has a downside too. If you’re communicating on Gmail with one team at work and on Slack with another, you’re constantly relaying the updates from one to the other. Both teams might have good reasons to use different platforms — our sales team at my company, for example, uses Gmail because we can use it to communicate within the team as well as with our customers outside of our network — but our IT department only uses Slack because it is a lot easier to have a group chat and keep multiple chats organized than it is with Gmail’s instant messaging system.
So whenever the sales team has to communicate with the IT team or them with us, often the most efficient way of communicating is walking down the hallway and talking to each other!
The problem with all this is that there is basically too much noise and not enough communication.
Important messages get mixed in with the chatter. Important details like appointments, reminders, and decisions get lost in the shuffle. Lacking a means of keeping track of the messages across the multiple platforms, communicating is often just a giant headache we prefer to ignore. But, as we are reminded on a daily basis, communication is essential.
I am a big user of Slack and know how noisy it can get. Lately I came across Fireflies AI, a Slackbot that helps simplify the clutter. Over the past couple weeks, it continues to impress me. It’s made by a very clever team based in San Francisco and it uses machine learning to pick up on key messages, helping me to keep track of assignments, appointments, meetings, calls, and other tasks very easily.
It’s about damned time a smarter and easier way of tracking work was created. After all, it’s 2017!
