It is insaitable...
The first rule of productivity: you are NEVER productive enough.
Email is something that I have only recently realised as something truly beautiful. Let me tell you why.
In David Allens "Getting Things Done", Allen introduces the idea of "open loops" which are basically any unresolved commitments. Instant messaging is a hostile environment for open loops.
If you have ever been told to do something over instant messaging and you forgot about it only to be reprimanded you have experienced a taste of "Instant Messaging Hell".
Even worse, if you have ever been told to do something over instant messaging and tried to go back looking for it only for it to be burried by conversations that range from meaningless to comedic to emotionally draining, you are half-submerged in Instant Messaging Hell.
If you take all of that and throw in group chats your all the way in baby.
When you sort conversations by the people who were involved in it, you lose your ability to find anything.
Instant messaging is designed to facilitate conversation but because of the frictionless nature of it, finding anything involves fighting the current of the river. If the waters are calm then it isn't that hard. If you are in 3 different group chats that encompass 2.3 friendgroups where there is consistent conversation happening in one or the other! Pain! Hell! How are you supposed to find anything?
Email sorts conversations based on the topic of the conversation.
Once you no longer need that conversation it can be safely discarded or archived.
The only conversations ever in your inbox are ones that are active and ones that are not can be deleted.
Email acts as an automatic collection box that as long as you review regularly (as you likely do with your instant messaging software) is a simple way to manage external commitments.
As much as I have praised email in this post I want to emphasise that I think it is less good at genuine conversation.
To be more descriptive I think that the nature of email adds enough friction that it forces users to think before they click send while instant messaging does the opposite.
I have conflicting feelings about this. On one hand the friction that facilitates that thinking before speaking is useful for those of us who often act emotionally or impulsively. On the other that friction that forces us to think can also cause us to overthink and end up not communicating at all.
Also obviously email is not good for things that need live responses such as if someone gets lost at a concert or something.
The realisation that sparked this blog post came in two parts:
Even like simple decisions like deciding if you want to go to an event or not and accidentally creating conflicting schedules. next on polyblog: calendars!
My question to you dear reader is this:
Is there ever a situation where the use of an instant messanger was good because it enabled an impulsive emotional conversation?
I feel like there is but I cannot think of one right now.
Yay! yay!!!! post blog yay!!!!
I want to talk about some of the plans I have for this website now
I want to make the main home page a bit more interesting. Right now it is a visual mess which I enjoy but it could be so much more...
I think I want to emphasise the offer of death more. A user should be offered the choice of death, go through a process and once vetted will have access to the "Death Home Page" where they can access a variety of tools
Still thinking whether I should lean into an overstimulating maximalism kind of aesthetic or something more simple.
I also want to make a place for more organised article or review style stuff.
The reason I want to seperate my blogs from other writing is because my blogs are supposed to be more a stream of consciousness and raw
I want to make more research heavy stuff and keep my blog to simpler reflections.
My idea is that the blog will maintain a minimalist aesthetic with little to no CSS because that reflects the ad hoc nature of how I am writing while articles have dedicated CSS files that cater to each one.
I also want to use my domain but first I have to transfer it from namecheap to cloudflare. Namecheap is weird with getting a HTTPS certificate I think?? Im not sure
I will do that first because I suspect itll take a while to go through or something
I also want to add an RSS file so people can see stuff on their RSS reader. That is low priority because it adds some extra work to each blog update. Maybe theres some way I can make a script that asks if I have updated the blog home page and the RSS file before I git commit
Website to do list:
I also want to slow down the output of my blog content so I can focus on other projects. Maybe I should set a timer. I often get lost in my writing and spend too much time on it. We will see how it goes.