Do you have a healthy daily communications diet? Is it well balanced and good for you? Like the “personal physical health” advice do you follow a 5 a-day plan for communications?
Like most people I try to stay healthy by having a balanced diet. I try to eat different things that all give me different health benefits. I try to avoid cutting out some types of foods or eating one specific type of food a lot because it tastes good. So far touch wood this seems to be working for me and physically I feel well on this self-regulated diet.
Recently I have been thinking about how such an approach would work to my “personal information health”, is a balanced communications diet important for me and what would my communication 5 a-day plan consist of? Let’s start with the why – why would a balanced communications diet be good for me?
Having a good communications diet would help me in 3 areas:
1. Perspective
An unbalanced diet would probably give me a false or inaccurate perspective on what is going on around me and how this might impact me. Being able to see things and understand things from different perspectives would help me normalise the information I am consuming and allow me to better see it for what it is.
2. Context
Getting the context right for the information I am consuming is important if I am to best act (notice I said act NOT react) on this information. Getting a balanced communications diet will help me put the right context on information that I consume by helping me interpret information relative to other related pieces of information from other sources.
3. Detail
It would be unrealistic to assume that I could get the complete picture from one information source. Like a jigsaw puzzle there are information pieces that I need in order to slot together and see the bigger or more detailed picture.
OK so what would a 5 a-day diet for communication look like?
Like any diet plan it needs to be tailored to the individual. There is a massive industry built on “carefully” designing diet plans for people based upon the physical characteristics, life style and personal goals so you need to think about these when putting a communications diet together.
As an example I will share with you my typical 5 a-day communications plan, this changes as I review my “personal information health”.
Note: In case you are wondering, I am a consumer and provider for each of these information sources.
- E/Mail – I work for an organisation that is working on ways to reduce internal e/mail, but, most of my business communications is with organisations that only use e/mail, so, e/mail is still an important information source
- SMS – Many of my colleagues, friends and family treat SMS as an information short circuit that gives them a direct path to my attention. I am lucky I still treat this as high priority since I don’t get too many SMS text messages so they are still rare enough for me to treat as “immediate information”
- Twitter – I view Twitter as shouting into a big room to see if anyone wants to listen, occasionally someone might and a direct interaction is started. There is lots of useful information in Twitter which I won’t go into now.
- Facebook – This mostly feeds my personal information needs relating to friends and relatives, it helps me keep perspective on what is happening with friends and relatives.
- LinkedIn – this is the business balance to Facebook. LinkedIn helps me keep a perspective and context on current and past business and professional relationships.
This is not exhaustive list, there are numerous other information sources that come into my diet from time to time such as Web Sites, Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, Instant Messaging etc
The key takeaway from this article is that you should think about how you can maintain a healthy and balanced communications diet and resist the “sweet tooth” temptation to “pig-out” on one source that is your current favourite flavour!
