Expectations change how the same experience feels.
More quotesApparently information overload existed before Slack. Inconsiderate of history, really. Every age appoints a new villain: railways, newspapers, television, email, feeds, notifications, AI-generated summaries of AI-generated summaries. The complaint survives because the machinery changes while attention remains stubbornly human.
History is not an alibi for firing twelve alerts before breakfast. Volume matters. But control, relevance and switching costs decide whether abundance feels useful or like being pelted with leaflets. Consider the comic triumph of a company knowledge base containing every answer and no trusted answer. Or the marketing dashboard with 180 metrics, all technically visible, none important enough to settle an argument. Streaming services offer thousands of things we requested and still leave us watching previews until bedtime.
The fashionable response is another layer: a digest of the alerts, a dashboard of the dashboards, a meeting to discuss communication overload. Marvellous. We have treated drowning by adding flavoured water. Curation is the product. Decide what can wait, what can disappear and what deserves interruption. Establish which channel means “now” and allow the others to mean something gentler. A good analyst is valuable not because they can show more numbers, but because they can remove ninety-nine and defend the one that changes the decision.
Information is cheap. A trustworthy “ignore this” takes judgement, nerve and somebody willing to delete a graph their boss rather likes.