Explain Everything: Intrusion Audit (from Make Yourself Clear)

In our forthcoming book - Make Yourself Clear: How to Use a Teaching Mindset to Listen, Understand, Explain Everything, and Be Understood, Steve and I write about “unwanted immediacy.” This is often evident in notifications, reminders, and unsolicited emails that appear in inboxes.

Not everything that can happen immediately necessarily should. Sometimes, these acts of immediacy border on intrusion. How much unwanted immediacy are you creating for your constituents? How much unwanted immediacy are you experiencing yourself?

To reflect further on this, we suggest the following mixed-media exercise:

• Over the course of an hour, a morning, an afternoon, or even an entire day, each and every time you get a unique notification (i.e. not a repeat from the same period) on your mobile device (Like a calendar appointment or text), your computer desktop (like a corner notification), and/or within your email (like a new message), take a screenshot.
• At the end of the day, use the template at the bottom of this post to create an Intrusion Audit. You can print this out and write on it, or you can use Explain Everything to import the template and your screenshots and arrange your images on the canvas.

I think I have a pretty good handle on my email and alerts, but in 16 minutes I had more than a few notifications. The first calendar reminder I received I guess was helpful, but I dismissed it before even reading what it was. I had to reset the alert just so I can make the screenshot (the contents of which I then edited out for this post).

Most notable, towards the end of my brief experimental period, was a sales/marketing email from a company from which I have received many unsolicited messages. The problem is that the "1" above my mail icon could be something internal and useful, or it could be useless like this message. I did select the option to stop sending the emails.

Give this exercise a try - even in 5 minutes you may be more aware of your relationship with reminders, alerts, and other signals of immediacy.

Intrusion Audit Template (PDF)
File Size:	685 kb
File Type:	pdf

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