Real-Time Alerts vs Real-Time Anxiety

There's a difference between an alert and a notification. A notification tells you something. An alert tells you to do something. Most marketing alerting systems blur this line and create dashboards-by-DM.

A useful alert has three properties: it fires only on conditions that warrant action, it points to the specific action, and it routes to the person who can take it. If any of those is missing, you're building anxiety, not awareness.

Practical heuristic: if the same alert fires three times and no one acts, the threshold is wrong, the routing is wrong, or the alert shouldn't exist at all.