Is email really so evil
With apologies to my dear friend Luis Suarez and his goal of eliminating email, there are just times when email does the job fairly well.
In Connected & For Better and Worse, Jon Husband pulls from today's NY Times piece on Smartphones as necessity. Quoting, Jon:
I have any number of friends and colleagues who have worked hard to eliminate or give up email … always because of the jam-ups they experienced, always so that they could avoid much of the intrusion from unwanted communications, and so that they would have more time to “converse” or communicate in other more effective ways. Now I am sure that they will spend much of their time in other, unintended intrusions from unwanted communications, or find out that email as a way of following and building a conversation, in context, is not so bad, etc.
The good parts of email is that, when it works well, it provides this ability to follow and build upon a conversation amongst a few people. The back-and-forth doesn't have to be real time, but over the course of a few days, it is a useful place to have and record a conversation.
The difficulty - and I think one that causes many people to drown in email - is that these conversations extend far beyond one or two people, or they extend outside of the single email conversation to include other email threads, websites, documents, and references to conversation fragments that happen outside the email environment (lunchtime, phone, IM, etc). In other words, the thread of the conversation gets lost or overwhelmed with everything else. Another element that Jon and the NY Times article touches upon is the social assumption that a reply is expected. This "overload" is why it is so important to have good practices around anything you use in your communications.
Some of those practices for email?
- Don't send email to people who don't need it. (Don't clog someone else's inbox.)
- Send email with clear subject lines and clear calls to action in the first few lines. (If people don't know what to do with your mail, it will clog up their inbox AND delay any response you were expecting.)
- If you must send attachments, tell people what you expect them to do with it. Is it an FYI? Do you want them to review it (by when)?
- Filter your incoming mail as much as possible (mailing lists and "news" blasts should stay out of your inbox).
- If you don't have time to reply to any messages, then don't bother checking your mail.
- When you make the time to read incoming mail, triage it immediately. There are many techniques. I still like the 4 D's: Do, Delete, Date, Delegate. This is all geared around getting it out of your Inbox, so it doesn't consume extra mental cycles. But you also must have a mechanism to access it at the appropriate time for those things that have been Date activated or Delegated. (Another take on email triage.)
- Be intelligent about using your smartphone in connection with email processing: many platforms make it difficult to file away mail, meaning you have to process it again when you get back to your main mailbox. The smartphone should be used to clear out the obvious Delete messages and potentially respond to emergencies.
This discussion of the limitations of email leads me to comment briefly on the written excitement over Google Wave. I'm not about to watch the 80 minute video posted to their website, but several commenters have boiled it down to something that makes more sense to me, namely the quote from Lars Rasmussen: What might email look like if it were invented today? (Good reviews from Tim O'Reilly and Mashable's Complete Guide.)
To my eyes, Google Wave is an attempt to address the many drawbacks of email that I mentioned above. It still assumes conversations are happening entirely electronically (and that the technology will be around to support Waves), but it also acknowledges the naturally distributed nature of communications. We will see what comes of it when they get around to releasing prototypes sometime later this year.
Back to the original topic... People want to be connected, and email has been a good source of this connection since the 90's. The problem is that there is just too much of it, and that it is over-used. Luis Suarez' is taking an extreme position intentionally, but many people would benefit from simply sending less.
5 Comment(s)
Luis, you are right, of course. We abuse each other terribly on email. Most people see it as a good-enough tool and they can't be bothered to search out or use other tools at their disposal. (Even I haven't been interested in looking at other "Personal KM" tools lately - mostly for the time involved.) I have a suspicion that Twitter / Facebook provides people some outlet for expression that goes beyond what they have done in email.
A thought: We should publish more articles on how to stop abusing email and start taking advantage of the tools readily at hand for most people. (Readily at hand meaning they already have it within their company or it is freely available online for personal use.)
Jack
Hi Jack! Thanks much for the follow up comment! Great feedback and surely agreeing with you that some times the learning curve may be so steep that it could discourage folks to dive in right away and explore the possibilities and opportunities. But perhaps once we reach out beyond that level things could get a lot better and much easier to absorb...
Oh, and on your last thought, hold it for a little bit, because I am already working on exactly that already! Putting together a blog post that will surely fit in with that purpose and which I am hoping to be able to share very soon! Stay tuned ... heh
What I keep cycling back to are two issues:
1. Every individual has their cognitive and productivity 'habits', and so communicate with others in their own ways ... and should recognize that the various people in their networks also have different cognitive and communicative styles. Some people like and are comfortable with email (whether as the central mechanism for communicating or as one of several), some people don't or want to eliminate all the unwanted incoming.
2. That then takes me to the issue of respect ... for others. I'll use myself as an example. I try hard to answer every blog comment (not there are lots ;-), every DM, every email .. and so on. Why ? Because I want to offer others respect (and portray myself as respectful).
There are professional friends and colleagues who do not anwer my emails ... and here I must note that I strive mightily to NOT send not-pertinent or not-useful emails to people. So, when some of these friends / colleagues do not reply / respond, our relationship has suffered. Why ? Because I feel that they do not respect me enough to reply (I don't care if it's a terse reply, or a gruff reply, or "I am not interested", etc.).
Just acknowledge.
If we (collectively) want to make the most of what is supposed to be a more conversational and exchange-based era, the embryonic interactive sociology of the Web (yes, I think it is still embryonic in the greater scheme of things), then I think we need to recognize and honour that there are those that are less 'advanced' in their use of tools, or may be limited to (say) email for any number of reasons.
I think what we should all strive to do is communicate more effectively and more attentively, rather than 'shooting from the lip' ... and for me sometimes, but not always, email is my preferred and chosen method. But / and I use all the others as well.
I agree with Jack that GWave seems promising, and I think we will all eventually adopt some mode of partially synchronous / partially asynchronous communication. I expect email will remain one of the arrows in the quiver for a very long time to come, and I agree with both Jack and Luis that additional discussion and education is useful regarding "This "overload" is why it is so important to have good practices around anything you use in your communications. "
Jon Husband
Hi Jon! Great follow up with some really thoughtful insights on what some of the challenges remain. You bring in a very good point with respect in those interactions for "the others"; and while I surely agree with you that respect much more of an understanding when you move the conversation into the 2.0 space. People in there, because you have been pretty open and public about your workflow can see whether they can expect an answer from you or not. They can see if they have contacted you when they might get, or expect, an answer. They can see what you are doing ... if you know what I mean.
With email, because of how locked inside of itself, with lack of visibility and awareness, it's almost impossible to do this, so you eventually expect a response back, because of what mentioned above. I think setting the expectations on those trust and respect levels are easier to maintain while out there in the open that in the closed case of email.
That's why my preference is not to use email whenever I can, and certainly what I have been doing all along throughout all of these months has been paying off tremendously, because it has helped me connect with my networks closer and they get to see & find out what I am up to at all times, and I establish different options / channels for us to reach out and connect. Not just a single, private, obscure one that not many people seem to be very happy about and exactly because of these same reasons ... Just my two cents... Thanks for keeping the conversation going!
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Hi Jack! No need to apologise my friend! Funny enough most people who have been following what I have been doing for over 16 months keep saying that I want email to disappear, to die off eventually and move on. Well, that's not the case. I, believe it or not, *still* believe that email is a good communication tool and one that will be there for a long while still.
What I am not so sure anymore, specially after having this experiment for so long, is that email is one of the worst collaboration tools available out there and your blog posts clearly outlines some of the main issues.
I am not saying that we should all get rid of email. No, I am not saying that. What I'm suggesting is that we need to stop abusing and misusing email at work quite a bit. Right now, it is being used for *absolutely* everything and that may not be the case; with the emergence of social software tools we are starting to come to terms with the fact there are better tools out there to help us collaborate and share our knowledge across much more effectively.
And that's what I am trying to suggest with this experiment; that there is a better way; that not everything should be going through email and that diversifying is good; it's a healthy behaviour; it's needed. It's just a matter of whether people would want to free themselves up from the stress of having to work with email 24x7x365 or start thinking that there's got to be a better way out there.
Believe me, there is ... :-)