Business | Bartleby

The horrors of shared docs

Transparent, user-friendly, maddening

An illustration of a document file with a few people dressed in business attire and an ant eater either peering out from the top and sides or stuck in the file headfirst.
Illustration: Paul Blow

Long long ago, colleagues would suggest changes to documents sequentially. They would make comments and add revisions to a file on their own computer, and then send it on to the next person. It was inefficient and opaque. The era of the shared doc has made this process much more user-friendly and transparent. But like all social activities, it has the great drawback of exposing you to other people.

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