Instant Messaging Kills Babies
By Daniel Miessler on August 9th, 2007: Tagged as Culture | Geek | Internet
I think I’m going to stop using IM. If you’ve studied time management systems such as GTD or 4HWW you know that one of the most important concepts is controlling your inputs.
Well, instant messaging does exactly not that. When you sign in to IM your basically saying:
Yeah, so here I am. Anytime you want to say anything at all — even if it’s not important — go ahead and just start talking…
Great. So every time someone wants to spontaneously have an entire conversation with you — you have to either 1) be rude, or 2) stop doing what you should be doing to engage them. I don’t like either of those options.
Think about it. Everyone is usually one of two types of people at any given moment — a busy person who uses IM for short, important messages, or a talker — the person who’s bored and wants to blather on incessantly. We all tend to switch back and forth between the two.
Well here’s the problem: there’s no way to sync these roles among those on your contact list. Some are always in “leave me alone” mode while the others are in “let’s talk about nothing” mode.
And when the “let’s talk about nothing” group engages the “leave me alone” group, you have lost productivity. The trick is that each group is changing membership every few minutes, so there’s no way to know if you’re about to annoy someone (or be annoyed).
I’m increasingly thinking the solution may be not to sign in at all.:
