The way we use Google Docs collaboration is wrong
The power of Google Docs, and the other products in the Google Suite, is its collaboration capability. Multiple authors can be working together on the same document, concurrently, or even asynchronously. You don’t need to send a marked-up version of a Word document around, nor merge various versions. There is a single version of the document. Google Docs has built-in version control. It makes previous versions of the document easily available, and you can find out who made which change when. You can comment on specific sections of the document, or assign action items in the margin.
Therein lies the rub. The commenting feature makes use lazy. It invites us to make drive-by comments and creates more work for the original author of the document. We love to add our two cents or wordsmith. In many case, these comments are rarely improving the document substantially. The commenting feature doesn’t really lend itself to elaborate, as comments are squished into the margin. Resolving the many many little comments becomes a job in itself. All this slows us down. I call it Execution Drag.
Instead, before we add our first comment, ask ourselves, is this comment making the proposal substantially better and am I using the right Google Docs’ feature to convey that feedback?
