For a while now, on and off these channels, and certainly in our business education and lecturing, we've been banging on about Slack as a communication platform for your organisation, be it your dental practice or your Global Implant Education Foundation.
I talk about this, and people say, "Yeah, yeah, but why don't I just use WhatsApp?" or "Yeah, Yeah, but you're just trying to punt another cutting-edge bit of technology that makes you look cool".
And so, this morning, I was on my bike in the shed, and I came off and just opened Slack and realised I had about 20 messages.
These are from different guys throughout our organisation (all of our TCC Slack is internal traffic, not external) and at different levels of the business. They are either asking different questions or reporting different bits of information or various things that are keeping us afloat.
My first response was to look at that and go, "FFS!" at all of this work, all of this stuff to look at. Then I remembered that every single one of those messages to me was from somebody within my business, and it was significant enough for them to send.
Slack is entirely different than any other form of communication you might look at and the paid version of Slack is different again.
We've used this in our business since about 2017 through the education side as discussion platforms and knowledge-sharing areas, but most significantly through our own business and most significantly through the pandemic to keep us alive.
What I realised this morning when I opened it and after it hit me that this was all our guys is that this is disruption and interruption, but only from the people that actually matter.
I also opened WhatsApp (f*ck*ng hate WhatsApp), and there were a couple of bits of information related to work from external sources, plus a load of other information to do with boys football, plus other stuff to do with people from other countries asking me a question, plus any number of things that were screaming in my ear that I didn't really want to look at and that was before I've even looked at emails (I don't look at them too often).
In 2015, I gave up social media because drinking from the social media fire hose was too much, and it completely distracted my focus from the things I wanted to do.
As I look now, I wonder how anybody manages to spend any of their life doing anything with all the different channels that they have.
For me, it's time to dial back again to gain more freedom, headspace, and focus, not less.
Not in a million years would I now open up an Instagram platform or TikTok or any other sh*t like that.
If you are privileged enough to have an organisation with other people in it, then for f*ck's sake, pay someone else to do that and summarise it for you because the carnage, the distraction, and the effect on your health are just catastrophic.
The information that you're receiving now on all of those platforms is so tainted, and so channelled in one direction due to the algorithm that you can't trust it anyway.
And so, maybe it's time for everybody to stop for a minute and have what used to be called a Facebook cull.
Do you remember that thing where you ended up with 400 friends, none of whom were your friends, and you cut it back to 50, and it was such a nicer thing; maybe it's time to do that with your platforms and your channels.
In the end, honestly, I think it's too late.
I think we've killed one or two generations of our youngsters on this, and they just can't exist without it.
But we still have a choice ourselves to stop, to stop looking and to build deeper, better, stronger connections with face-to-face people that we trust and like and see their reactions when things happen.
It's time to switch it off.
I'm off to switch something else off.
Blog Post Number - 3811
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