About message fatigue

Posted by Paul Colligan on Monday, December 12, 2011
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About message fatigue (mp3)

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  • Ken

    Paul, you are not alone.  I actually still feel an obligation to read all of my emails (or at least skim to get a sense of each one’s importance or lack thereof).  I am afraid to miss something in life!  However, this process takes hours every day, and most of that time is time wasted. 

    I get a hell of a lot of urgent sounding ad-mail from gurus and their affiliates.  Once I can an idea of the product that is being pushed for the current month, I sort by “from” and do mass deletions of those senders, without any further reading.  Tell Mike I’m sorry, but 20 e-mails on his new Mojo product is 19 more than I needed.

    However, there are some groups i am in, like You.Everywhere.Now that take up a lot of time but also yield a lot of good information.  I would love to hear some ideas on how to cut down on the time spent reading these message streams. 

    Message overload has gotten impossible to keep up with, and is getting worse!

  • Ken

    Paul, you are not alone.  I actually still feel an obligation to read
    all of my emails (or at least skim to get a sense of each one’s
    importance or lack thereof).  I am afraid to miss something in life! 
    However, this process takes hours every day, and most of that time is
    time wasted. 

    I get a hell of a lot of urgent sounding ad-mail
    from gurus and their affiliates.  Once I get an idea of the product that
    is being pushed for the current month, I sort by “from” and do mass
    deletions of those senders, without any further reading.  Tell Mike I’m
    sorry, but 20 e-mails on his new Mojo product is 19 more than I needed.

    However,
    there are some groups i am in, like You.Everywhere.Now that take up a
    lot of time but also yield a lot of good information.  I would love to
    hear some ideas on how to cut down on the time spent reading these
    message streams. 

    Message overload has gotten impossible to keep up with, and is getting worse!

  • Aubrey

    Paul – excellent question! LOL…message armageddon! lol Not sure. As a consumer, I am totally overloaded, even hearing from people whose lists I WANT to be on and WISH to hear from. I just canNOT possibly keep up. I really like Ken’s comments here about some of the guru’s pushing the envelope. I agree totally that many info publishers, many of whom I love, are really getting to a point with this topic where they (and their list) may be better served by doing less, not more.

    Funnier still, I when I receive an affiliate offer from half a dozen people all promoting the same product. I get the process, and I don’t resent any of them, as I like each one of them…but certainly there are some who frankly overdo it and I have gotten absolutely RUTHLESS about simply going down the left hand check-box column in my gmail account, selecting 10-20 at a time and just deleting them in mass. 

    I’ll skim the subject line AT BEST…and on a day where I’m feeling annoyed at the mail overwhelm, I’m even more unattached. 

    On social media…I am to the point now where…for my own business…I am totally on the side of posting a bit LESS frequently, as people on the other end are ALL dealing with this issue.

    Personally, I know a few in the IM / publishing world who tweet and update and whatever actually somewhat INfrequently and…as it turns out…I find MYSELF actually placing a much higher value on their stuff when it comes flying by: they are rarer. Basic economics and psychology. 

    Lisa Lang, Leslie Rhode…these are a few who I don’t from…at least via email all that often…but when I do…I LISTEN. 

    Love Ryan Deiss and some of his stuff, but am get so tired of being constantly slammed with offer after offer after offer.

    I don’t know. In the end I think from the receiving end, I and many others are simply getting much more comfortable hitting the DELETE button or, simply are getting more comfortable using the excuse…”Oh, I’m sorry, I must’ve missed it.” You know why…because it’s absolutely a legitimate excuse!

    From the broadcast, business owner’s end…I absolutely am beginning to error on the side of respecting this very real issue among MY audience and doing less, not more. I believe Amy Porterfield recently alluded to this as well.

    Anyway, tough question to answer, but great question to ask!

    Thanks Paul, 

    Aubrey

  • Anonymous

    Appreciate the kind words – but what do we do with this fact? How do we respond? What happens next?

  • Anonymous

    So it’s getting worse – what do we do?

  • Anonymous

    What do we do professionally and corporately?

  • http://www.joomla-web-developer.com joomla developers

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  • http://www.facebook.com/siddiquem Muhammad Siddique

    As always thanks for your sharing your wisdom.. Your email is one of the email, I READ your tuesday emails and LOVE it.

  • http://twitter.com/chris2x Chris Christensen

    Make a plan
    1) Good email filters is a great start at seeing the messages you want to see. As a start, sort all email that does not include your email individually into a read later folder. You can also make rules to add in emails that have “unsubscribe” or such language. That filters out some emails that you can deal with later.
    2) Carve out times for work. Turn off twitter, facebook, etc for hours at a time. Set the email notification on your email not to show you when new emails come and preferably not to check more often than once an hour.
    3) Use a macro program like TypeIt4Me to automate all or part of your responses to routine queries so they take less time.
    4) Decide how you are using different services. LinkedIn for me is only for people I have worked with or talked to in person. FaceBook is only for friends, family and old co-workers. Twitter is a free-for all, but I have a private list of only 200 people that I try and read every tweet (Paul included). Foursquare is only for the people I would want to walk up to me during a lunch and interrupt me and who I would hate to miss they were in town. So I am only trying to make new friends on Twitter.
    5) I have decided not to do email on my phone on any regular basis. I can get it if I need to but don’t stress about it.

  • http://www.expertsmarketingcoach.com Trish Jones

    Tough one Paul. Our Church has gone from printing leaflets about events and making announcements to telling people check the website. Even I as a techie find it irritating and presumptuous – it assumes everyone has access to the web. It might be easy to say, know your audience but even your audience will use different mediums. 

    I don’t want to be a politician and answer a question with a question but could it be that we’ve gone too far with freedom of choice and it’s time to reign things in and choose a few ways of communicating that people get used to … like people who buy newspapers buy it for a reason, like those who watch TV or listen to radio?  At the moment, it feels like no one has a mind of their own. It feels like advertising all over again – I must do it because company X does it, and I know they don’t make any money from their advertising, but I think I should.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks!

  • Anonymous

    So you have a strategy for Chris. What’s Chris’ strategy for communicating with others?

  • Anonymous

    “Owning the conversation” is always an interesting option.

  • DrMigaly

    I just posted my note on your FB, here is a pasted copy for those who are not on FB: Peter Migaly message fatigue affects all of our lives. I’m a psychiatrist and some therapist advocated to the theory that this phenomena also contributes not only that the attention span decreases, and that the TV ads are shorter and shorter, but that the rate of depression is increasing. In the old times if someone died we could morn, there was time and support and discussion about it in the neighborhood, but now we are bombarded with unpleasant messages in the News, and boom here comes the other one, from natural disasters to man made one, and there is no time to process all that. We are all affected not just with the tool in the economy (billions of $s a year and yes paid in part from your soc sec contribution, but also by how we relate to each other at work and the relative lack of random kindness that is surrounding all of us. So here is my 2 cents on that.

  • Antony

    Hi Paul,

    interesting question. I try to focus quality relationships with customers,
    and less quantity. There will always be time for people we know well.

    Antony.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the cross posting – i was gonna ask you to do that.

  • Anonymous

    I like the idea – but I’m gonna suggest we have the same problems even for the people we hold dear. A good friend of mine has no cell phone, barely checks email and only has about a 5% chance that a message I leave on his home phone will ever get to him.

    It’s an hour so many hours in the day kinda thing. When it takes a week for us to finally connect, we seldom connect as much as we’d like.

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