Tome or not to tome, that is the question

Pre-Groove days I used to write looong e-mails to colleagues. I would spend hours crafting every word. Later I would find that the email had not been read. I took this personally. How dare anyone not read something of importance that I had deliberated on! I felt chided. So what did I do next? I wrote another email. My colleagues in their turn felt battered.

Now although I can imbue myself with feelings of self-guilt about being "unable to communicate effectively", I now know there is more to this. True, it does not matter what technology you have under your belt, long-winded tomes do not understand technology, they just require a keyboard, a word-processor and some fingers.

And to underline that it does not matter about technology, an ex-colleague specialised in lengthy tomes in Groove. The last I saw ran to 70 pages of what could be compressed into 1 page. But that's another story.

But used well, Groove can reduce that tome length down. It does that because Groove operates at the level of thought. It is excellent at sharing those thoughts effectively. A thought is usually much less than an essay, it can be word, a graphic, a comment. It can be an idle gesture that in a lateral thinking way sparks something.

Groove documentation talks of deltas. That's what Groove is good at, nay absolutely excels at. And that's what makes Groove so ultra-special. The feeling of exhileration when you are bouncing ideas from people sends electricity down your fingers and inspires you. Quite inspirational.