Do we need to rebalance our collaboration rights and responsibilities?

For a long time, an important part of my job has involved collaborating with others on shared documents. The way this often used to happen was that one person was the lead and held the document master, they shared a copy of it with others, and the others would each send back their comments/ suggestions/ requests/ changes to the lead, and the lead would be responsible for integrating everyone else’s stuff into the master. Now that is considered very cumbersome and old school, and instead we have shared documents that we can all edit/ comment on etc. in real time. Although I haven’t yet seen the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, modern collaboration feels a bit like that title to me. I know there are lots of benefits to that approach, but I also feel that there are some downsides. Everything feels a bit more chaotic and hard to handle to me. Even when managed well. And it feels scary for me to admit that. Like I am revealing a dark fetish that is unacceptable to modern society. I feel the same about electronic communication. There are so many channels now – for me, work and personal emails, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, SMS/ Apple iMessage, Microsoft Teams (and maybe a few others I am forgetting.) I have also been asked by others to use Signal and Telegram too from time to time. It feels like everyone has the right to choose their preferred channel to communicate with everyone else, and we must be ready to receive and respond on all channels. This remind me of those who are reacting against the ‘wokeness’ in social discourse, where everyone’s rights are focused on, but not so much their responsibilities. I do think the modern world is a wonderful place, and many things are going in the right direction. But maybe we have to recognize that focusing on everyone’s right to do everything exactly the way they want it, when they want it and where they want it inevitably causes some entropy, some chaos. It is the inescapable yin to the yang of more open collaboration. We each have to practically balance our rights versus our responsibilities. Or maybe I am just an old curmudgeon who fantasizes about one inbox and more controlled collaboration. #unthink #unask #unlearn #communication #collaboration #woke