The overwhelming nature of e-mail was in the news this week as Google rolled out Priority Inbox, a new feature that organizes your incoming Gmail messages according to their presumed importance to you.
The idea behind Priority Inbox is pretty simple: It tracks your inbox behavior, determines which e-mails you open fastest and respond to most, then pops those messages to the top of your queue, marking them as “important” as opposed to “everything else.”
The algorithm looks at the sender’s name as well as keywords within the message, and it gets more accurate over time. In fact, you can help train the system by giving it this-is-significant or this-doesn’t-matter hints.
No matter how well Priority Inbox works as an automated filter, of course, we all understand that it won’t be perfect. Imagine, for example, that you’ve received a happy update from a long-lost relative or a surprise query from a potential employer: Without any past behavior signaling that you’d consider these e-mails important, Gmail would squirrel them away with “everything else.”
And while these types of e-mails might be rare, they illustrate an important point: When it comes to understanding information, people out-perform machines. And it makes sense for us to capitalize on that human advantage rather than give it up as another lost art.
The idea that we should constantly automate is a common theme in American business. Once we apply the right structure, the thinking goes, our work can be done more quickly and predictably, requiring little cerebral input from us. It worked for Henry Ford, after all, so why not broaden the brush?
But there are other common themes in American business these days, too, such as “Please respect me as an important person, and not just a cog in the wheel,” “Please understand my talents are unique, and don’t replace me with a less-skilled worker,” and “Please don’t threaten my business and take away my livelihood by preferring cheaper/faster goods from somewhere else.”
The problem is, these thoughts don’t mesh well with “Let’s keep making our tasks so easy that we don’t really have to think” – because it’s incongruous to expect that our intelligent human input should be minimized but our impressively individual roles should be assured.
Automating certain tasks at work is a handy and helpful thing, but sometimes it’s just another kind of waste. If we truly want a workplace where our skills have value and our personal output can’t be cloned, we need to apply our minds and our talents in ways that no algorithm can match – instead of performing our work so mindlessly that a system needs be developed to rescue us from ourselves.
The only reason we need a function that wades through our copious screeds of e-mails and decides which ones matter and which ones don’t is because too many of us are sending out, on balance, too little that’s “important” and too much of “everything else.”
Let’s put a stop to that problem, and let’s stop turning our jobs into a series of mindless tasks, by tapping into our intelligence and talent on a regular basis – for example, before we hit Send.
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Posted by: data center | December 24, 2011 at 06:45 PM
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