I was lecturing about Information Overload at an MBA course in Haifa University, and a student shared a lovely story. Long ago, she said, before email replaced paper correspondence, she used to work at a company where memos were written on special forms that came as a three-layer stack with chemical copying. You’d write or type the top layer and two copies were created on the layers below.

This was very convenient (you didn’t need to mess with Carbon Paper) but had one side effect: you could only create up to three copies at once. If you needed more, you’d need to write on a new stack, laboriously copying what you’d written before.

Guess what, she concluded the story: people would make every effort to drop names from the dist list of the memo, until there were only three names on it.

Too bad email doesn’t have a similar incentive for frugal sending…