Oversharing is killing my inbox

By Claire Ayles

We all know how annoying it is when people share mundane posts about their cat or upload photos of their dinner on Facebook?  Well this problem of ‘oversharing’ has now hit the business world.

I’m signed up to various collaboration tools like Box, Basecamp and Huddle, and they’re undeniably useful for sharing documents, especially with clients and other agencies.  But there is a downside. I’m now drowning in their email notifications.

While I used to get emails with documents handily attached, I now get the same number of slightly less useful emails telling me to go somewhere else on the internet to find a document that’s been slightly altered.  And that document might not even be relevant to me.  To put it into context, I’ve had 25 such messages overnight.

I appreciate that receiving an extra 25 messages is your quintessential first world problem, and as I said before, these platforms do make life easier, but it does strike me as slightly ironic, considering these tools have always been heralded as the answer to email overload.

Now if only someone could tell me how to turn off the email notifications…