Peter Cochrane: My recurring messaging nightmare

Over four decades ago I was paper-bound, with a secretary and access to a typing pool to help me cope with a workload that was wide, deep and fast changing.

My management role demanded the creation of some five letters, and the reading of up to 15 documents, each day. It all felt edgy and could be stressful, but then the PC arrived and after a few hiccups my work and mode of operation was transformed. No more dictation, no multiple transcription errors and corrections, no carbon-paper, goodbye to the typing pool, and a transformation of my secretary's role to that of an assistant.

But the magic was not to last. As more people adopted email globally the number of messages, reading and typing load accelerated: 20, 50, 120, 250 emails a day. It seemed to take no time to find myself in another crisis: junk. Subject and people filters, delegation, remove me requests, not required replies, I have no interest/this is not my patch/not my bag responses, all helped and got me back to some degree of sanity.

And over the years it has become more and more sophisticated with new tools including AI to help me manage. Thankfully, too, people have progressively abandon the long-winded and verbose ‘paper letter style' to adopt a more terse and to the point emails.

Within my first decade of email use the texting facility arrived on my ‘chunky - size of a house brick' mobile phone. The combination worked well and some pressure was taken off my email loading. Instant messaging followed and that seemed like a boon too in speeding up the workplace and mobile/travel related collaboration and working.

All well and good, but now there is another nightmare, and on a killer scale! Out of the blue came FaceBook and Messenger, Linked-in Messaging along with Webex, Skype, Teams, Zoom, Google Meetings/ Hangouts, Slack, Telegram, Blink, Hub, Front, Flowdock, Trello, GoToMeetings et al. This is a mega-scale nightmare of unidentifiable notifications on my phone with no hint of their origin. Every company, institution, group and individual has their favourite, which sees me loading apps I don't like and scarcely use. Worse - I keep missing messages and the time cost of trawling multiple apps is considerable.

Unfortunately, this was all just the thin edge of the web as the whole scenario is being repeated by phone calls! Many of the conferencing and team apps have a VoIP call facility and the best I seem to be able to do is assign a different ringtone to each. There are even those hanging on to dial in conferencing services for audio and video that need ‘special/museum' apps. The spectrum is not just vast, it is all down to choices and preferences of others, and I have no sway!

And then of course there are all the streaming services for music, talking books and podcasts plus movies, TV and video. A side effect of this comms chaos is that my once perfectly organised diary is a war zone as I receive requests form invisible channels with no outline or explanation.

But, there is now a glimmer of hope and help in the form of service aggregation apps that ‘front-end' each zoo of apps to present a common and singular interface. As far as I can see this has only happened for streaming so far but it sure is needed for all the rest if this phase of the nightmare is to come to an end.

Peter Cochrane is professor of sentient systems at the University of Suffolk, UK