Water, water, everywhere...

Drop a frog into a vessel of water and heat the vessel slowly. As the water turns lukewarm, the frog moves around enthusiastically, enjoying the swim and unaware of the lurking danger. As the water turns warmer, the frog's natural instincts to escape are dimmed and hence it moves about frantically. As the water comes to a simmer, it gets hugely uncomfortable, but the frog just doesn't jump out. Finally, as the water hits boiling point, the frog, having lost its instinctive, emergency response just gets boiled, and turns up dead.

The "boiling frog syndrome" is a popular experiment in behavioural psychology. Now, lets look at one of its many parallels in the human realm.

Not too long ago, we had access to free and clean water, all that we needed and more than that. Over time, we started running into acute shortages, but these were random and very uncommon. 

Fast forward few years and water shortages became a regularity, albeit at few times of the year, such as the summer and only in certain geographical areas.

Enter the current times and scarcity of clean water is a daily issue, through the year. Most natural water sources and underground water levels have dried up, and we regularly pay to secure partial supply. This isn't too different across the world and the water-abundant regions are now the exceptions. 

The surprising part in all this is that, we have become inured to the rapid depletion of this natural resource, and for some strange reason this doesn't sound as alarming as it should be. Apart from the occasional news stories, NGO research reports or apocalyptic movies, this issue doesn't seem to merit much attention. Just as was the case with the frog, when this reaches a boiling point, it might be too late for any response.

Are emails killing your credibility with your users?

After salvaging my work inbox from clutter, I set out to get my personal gmail inbox in order. Only this time the challenge was bigger: with over 25,000 unread emails.

Over the past 10 years, my inbox had fallen into partial neglect and slow decay. With a lot of spam and newsletters flowing in, I missed to do a cleanup.  Though I have been picking up most personal conversations and notifications, given this high noise-to-signal ratio, I had been missing out on some. If you haven't heard back on an email you sent me long ago, you now know why!

When I started cleaning, I couldn't fathom what could possibly cause 25,000 emails over a few years. How much I wish that gmail offered a simple tool that showed a categorical breakup of top sender/type of email, with a simple visual like the one below, that I put together indicatively?

I was horrified to find that every digital interaction online had each produced a stream of 'newsletters'. You buy something on an ecommerce/travel site (Flipkart, Makemytrip...), they send you daily emails on anything that they sell. You install an Android app (Zomato, Tripadvisor...), they spam you. You register for a new service online (Stumbleupon, Flipboard...), they flood you with offers. You register for a conference or download articles, they notify about every event or file that they add. This included websites that I had not directly given my email address, as well.

This apart, there were the set of 'genuine' spam emails sent from dubious entities offering retirement benefits to those promising 'secret offshore funds'. But these were easier of the lot. Its straightforward to clear them and after a few times of classifying them as spam, the gmail spam filter takes over.

I took about 2 weeks to painstakingly clear the newsletters and unsubscribe to all of them. Companies have created this credibility crisis by wilfully pushing daily mailers to unsuspecting consumers, which is not too different from continuous cold-calling your prospects every single day. Most of them don't even bother to check email preferences when they sign you up. What's worse is that for some the unsubscribe process is not straightforward, or just doesn't work. You eventually have to mark these as spam to avoid having them show up, something that I didn't want to do in the first place. Few mailers sure include an 'unsubscribe' link in the email, but they are carefully buried deep inside that one needs to search (see highlight in image below)! 

Given a choice, I would love to hear back from most of the websites, but at a much lesser frequency AND on areas/categories of my interest. Surprisingly, even when you unsubscribe, most websites just have a binary option of 'subscribe/unsubscribe', and don't bother checking if they can retain users by bringing down frequency or categories of notification. There were a handful of professional sites like the McKinsey Quarterly that not only check preferences while you sign up for the first time, but also have helpful options to stay connected sans the clutter. I guess most users would find something like the below page relevant, appealing.. and honest.

Do Business cards still make sense?

A business card from 1895. Surprisingly, they haven't evolved much

The past week I was in the Hyderabad Startup Saturday meetup, a monthly gathering organized by HeadStart. Bumping into some interesting folks, I was networking and exchanging business cards. But all through, I had this awkward feeling of practicing an anachronistic custom, not very different from dispatching a snail mail postcard in the internet age. That made we wonder whether business cards had outlived their once-useful lifespan?

Let's face it. We use cards to exchange contact details, and what do they generally contain? Name, role, phone, email, website and maybe a couple of social profile handles. But, when was the last time you wrote down a mobile number from a friend and keyed it into your phone manually? How much more awkward it can get to key in a twitter handle from the card?

Agreed, cards help register one's name and role, as a supplement to the spoken word. In some occasions, they can be useful icebreakers to strike up conversations. And, there is always the possibility to impress with an unconventional design. 

But these aren't reasons enough to keep business cards, which are actually vestiges of the erstwhile corporate era, on ventilator-support. Yes, there have been barcode incorporated cards and other digital embellishments on a physical card, but these solutions are akin to taping a brick-phone from the 90s with a GPS navigator device, on its rear.

Lets think up some alternate possibilities. What if we can enable digital-handshake by letting people wave off their mobile phones, to automatically exchange a profile brief and all their social handles (perhaps even contextually deciding whether to share Linkedin/Twitter handle with a professional contact or Facebook/Instagram profile with a friend). The person can then choose to glance at the profile brief on mobile and then with a single click add the shared contacts to all relevant platforms.

Atleast, this would help save the hassle of printing and maintaining currency of a physical business card. And it will definitely do away the awkwardness of reaching out into one's pocket to pull out a piece of paper for networking.

PS: At the time of posting, I did a quick check on prevalent apps that address this problem. There seem to be some action over the past few years, and a few of them seem to be catching up. But, the final word from several experts is that physical cards are giving a tough fight, and they just refuse to roll up and die!

Staying on top of your online reads

About 5 years back, I had first set up RSS feeds of my favourite news sites and blogs on Google Reader. It was a nice and simple interface to consume content. That was until Google decided to shut it down, amidst huge uproar from loyal users. After evaluating options, I settled on Feedly, which seemed promising and importantly offered one-click migration, by pulling in all feeds from the Reader. It has served me well the past couple of years, and this post is about how I've organized my Feedly account over time to stay on top of content.

With a limited set of feeds, organizing and reading stuff doesn't need much of thought. As you keep continually adding feeds, things start getting a bit muddled with diverse categories of interest, variety of sources (self-hosted websites, medium, blogger, news sites) and a varying velocity of feed generation - ranging from hundreds every week to an occasional gem-of-a-post.

I started simple with just 2 categories to group all feeds or article sources - 'Headlines' or the not-to-be-missed articles and 'Others', that had everything else. Eventually, my sources grew to over 100 feeds, and 'Headlines' ballooned to over 50. Overwhelmed by this torrent of information, I did some minor re-categorisation which didn't seem to help. I was looking for an optimal mix of categories, while also being able to flag off the 'hot sources' across categories.

Preview of my Feedly panel

Eventually I settled on 7 categories (as shown in the image) to organize the feeds, with each having not more than 15 to 20 feeds each. To maintain sanity, I keep purging sources that doesn't match up with consistent content. Feedly has a super-useful feature of flagging of favourite sources by them as 'promote to Must read', which essentially mirrors the same feeds onto a separate list called 'Must reads'.  This list is again kept at around 15 to 20 feeds and any new additions are always after some removals, to keep it manageable. This workflow has been working well for me, and here are things I like most about Feedly:

1. Good UI with a easy procedure to add & organize content. The feed recommendations are quite relevant too.
2. Clean reading interface with 5 presentation layouts ranging from a mailbox view, cards or an online magazine layout to fast-read stuff. I generally use the 'magazine' layout.
3. Features in the free version are good enough for basic usage, with unlimited feeds & social sharing options bundled.
4. Maintains a 30-day window for articles, after which they get cleared. As opposed to storing content over months or years and getting inundated with scary notifications of thousands of unread articles, I've realized that this time-bounded expiry brings in some reading discipline.