If The Message Is Important, It Will Find Me | Hacker News Reader

If The Message Is Important, It Will Find Me

avc.com

18 pointswinanga6 comments

I'm all for managing "message overload" and there are plenty of ways to do it.

However, the door swings both ways ... if you're gonna ignore people you no longer have a right to expect replies to your emails/msgs

> if you're gonna ignore people you no longer have a right to expect replies to your emails/msgs

Wilson asked me (personally) to tell him the product of one of his portfolio companies would work for an application that I was designing. I spent a fair amount of time looking at said product after it became clear that I wasn't going to use it so I could write up a reasonably comprehensive discussion. Yup, I spent more time.

I sent this writeup to him by e-mail and he never bothered to respond.

I introduced some of my friends doing a company to Fred, and had one of the CEOs of a current Union Square investment (that is doing well) also recommend them by email. He said to me he would meet with them, and never emailed them back.

I've tried taking this attitude in the past, but it only works if you have a well developed social circle with friends and colleagues who have a good estimate of what you think is important. Otherwise, you suffer from two disadvantages from the philosophy...

1) Information that gets to you will be filtered by an "importance guesstimate." Some information will not reach you, because your social circle will regard the info as useless, irrelevant, or "impolite." This last one is dangerous, because such information is the kind this disproves the axiom "What you don't know can't hurt you."

2) People in your social circle may have a higher view of their own judgment that they do of yours, even if they correctly know what's important to you. Therefore, you will sometimes get information you DON'T want and waste your time because your friends and associates will have their own agendas to push in providing extra info to you.

Marketers have been dealing with increasingly-"deaf" audience for ages now. This is just a high profile example of it, but it's not new nor revolutionary: it's part of the trend.

loudness != importance

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