The Annoy­ing Pro­duc­tive Guy At Work: Sham­ing Users One Color At A Time

“My new assis­tant is an 18-year-old ‘mil­len­nial,’ as I guess we’re call­ing them now. He’s a young com­puter Borg who could hack before he could walk. In a prob­a­bly vain attempt to keep him from quit­ting before I get in at least one decent vaca­tion, I’m con­stantly look­ing for ways to keep him engaged.

‘What IS all this crap??’ He guf­faws at the cas­cade of emails that greets us every morn­ing. ‘Do you really READ all of this??’

You don’t read it, I tell him, you PROCESS it. It’ll take months before he learns to fish the actions out from the dozens and dozens of mes­sages clog­ging his in-box all day long. But once he learns to man­age the broad­cast, he’ll also get a front-row seat for the epic drama of fear and heart­break that passes through our mail server every day. Our company’s high reliance on email cre­ates such a dense bar­rage that it cre­ates a per­fect means through which things fall through the cracks.…

In effect, I’ve started an ongo­ing email clinic. Some peo­ple respond to the com­pe­ti­tion: they want a lower num­ber than Lumpy in the next desk over. Oth­ers will just add me to their pile of unread mes­sages. But folks are also com­ing for­ward who are gen­uinely inter­ested in free­ing them­selves. I’m sure my approach won’t work on every­one. After all, no one gets up at the crack of dawn and tries to cram 60-plus hours of work into 40-hour work week, just so they can sat­isfy the arbi­trary impo­si­tions of some guy from another depart­ment that they hardly know. But I keep the offer out there, and even­tu­ally I’ll res­cue the ones worth sav­ing. To be hon­est though, I’m really just try­ing to save myself. It’s these mod­est checks in the win col­umn that help me make it through the work day.” [43 Fold­ers]

I totally get the whole “What is all this crap?” sen­ti­ment. :-p

I would have imple­mented this as a car­rot, rather than a stick, but I love that atti­tude of help­ing oth­ers who are ready to be helped. It’s where many of us have to put our ener­gies in order to be effec­tive. Who can you help?

See also: Five Tips for Imple­ment­ing Social Soft­ware in Your Library from Rob Coers, via Michael Stephens. I love Rob’s slide (and atti­tude), and I love Michael’s addi­tion of “focus on the pos­i­tive.” Life is too short to spend it being neg­a­tive, folks. Again, I ask, who can you help?