The Fatigue is Real. (Part 1)

(DISCLAIMER: This part is not really about 3D or AI Pipelines or Processes. It’s about something bigger, and I’ll get back to how it this affects 3D/AI pipelines in the next issue.)

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a trend.

Not a good one.

My wife and I were talking about our jobs and family, and how many communication channels there are. We are now inundated with so many different platforms for communication, that I feel that it’s taking it’s toll on most people, myself included. I’ve started noticing that all of these tools that are meant to create instant connection are actually doing the opposite.

They are exhausting us.

I’m old enough to remember the days when the three ways to communicate with someone were 1) a phone call, 2) a letter, or 3) to meet in person.

Those times were slower. It was much more difficult to communicate, and if you got a letter from someone, it was a real event. You waited for it, and responded as quickly as you could.

If someone called me (at my home phone where my sister would pick up, answer the phone, and then yell for me to come to the kitchen to talk to my friend), it was something you didn’t just brush off.

Meeting in person was the best. You could talk and discuss, and the conversation went a lot of different places.

Communication was easy. It was simple.

Then came the days of AOL Instant Messenger, and MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.

It was incredibly efficient and convenient to have constant conversations going on. But it was not in your pocket. It was on your desktop, and you had to be there in order to use it.

Once the cell phone became ubiquitous, texting then became a quick way to communicate on the go. Now you could chat at your desk, and on the go!

Email has always been there (at least in my lifetime), and started with a Hotmail account, then a Yahoo account, followed by your work email, and then Gmail showed up.

All of the sudden, we had to start managing multiple channels.

Today, I look at my phone and Desktop, and here’s what I have:
- Discord (20+ channels, each with 10’s-100’s of posts/conversations )
- Slack (5+ channels, each with 10’s-100’s of posts/conversations)
- Teams (Multiple companies, with multiple calendars, announcements, and even more chat threads)
- WhatsApp
- Zoom
- Signal
- Telegram
- FB Messenger
- Facebook
- Instagram posts, DMs, Group messaging, etc.
- X
- Google Chat
- Gmail (multiple accounts), Yahoo Mail, Proton Mail, Outlook Mail
- LinkedIn, with multiple DMs

This trend I mentioned at the beginning - the not good one - I think has a very explainable cause.

We are all in communication overload.

We see so many alerts, so many notifications, so many responses, so many questions, and so many distractions, that people are starting to just ignore it all. The very platforms meant to bring us together are silently separating us. I find myself caught up in it.

In the past few weeks, I’ve reached out to people that I have a personal relationship with, mainly about work, and I’ve noticed that I have almost a 100% non-response rate, even after a follow up email or text.

Ghosting.

This is becoming an issue not just for me, but for nearly all of us.

From job hunting, to sales, to information gathering (I emailed a few people that I know to gather some information from them about the 3D industry and what they were concerned about and received no response, even after multiple reach-outs), and many other communications, ghosting is becoming more and more prevalent.

This is affecting all of us. We communicate less. We communicate less clearly. We have too many tools that muddy our communication lines. And the result is that we just ignore communication. This is not only fatiguing when receiving communications, but it’s also fatiguing when trying to send communications.

How does an overwhelming communication overload compare to a 3D/AI pipeline? In the next part, I’ll discuss how it’s nearly identical: how complicated pipelines with too many options create slowdown and bloat, and that prevents data from moving quicky and smoothly.

One thing that I love doing is talking in person with individuals at companies who are trying to figure out their 3D/Ai pipelines. If you would like to discuss what you are doing with your product pipeline, and would like to know more about how you can make it more powerful, efficient, faster, and more flexible, set up a quick discovery call with me. I look forward to meeting with you!

About this newsletter: Every week, I share some insights into 3D content creation pipelines - tools, processes, success stories, pipeline mistakes, and more. It’s meant to help those involved in 3D product creation, from artists to managers and leadership, understand what is happening in their world, and how to use the latest technologies to create higher quality with greater efficiency, saving time and money.

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