Email is evil - all hail email
05 September 2024
Why do people like email?
TL:DR People like email because there are very few gatekeepers and it kinda just works. Better sharing and a better User Experience in a wiki will make people more productive.
It just works
Email was the first communication tool on the internet and it shared the pioneering spirit of a shared knowledge world. It has survived even Microsoft, Google and Apples mucking with it. It is a standard and people love it.
Email, like snail mail, lets you send a message with all sorts of content (OK not perfectly) to anybody. What’s more you can send the same thing to multiple people, immediately. You can reply and include some more people, and it will work. You don’t need to wait for an administrator to allow you to send an email to someone new.
But…
Email is interrupt driven, meaning it relies on the “You have mail” notifications to get peoples attention, and because you know this people expect a response straight away. Of course, that doesn’t happen with snail mail because it’s delivered once a day and people don’t expect a response for a week!
Email’s openness and ease of use in a small groups or teams is quickly lost when you move to larger cross-functional teams too, because you get interruptions from people you don’t know and weren’t expecting.
And when people send out an email to the whole organisation, and someone replies to the whole organisation, which prompts another response, you get interrupted each time for an email you weren’t interested in or could have waited.
Each interruption creates a small cognitive load, a change of track in your brain that takes time to change back to… what was it you were doing?
Email then trains you into busy work or fire fighting, where you learn that the way you work is by hopping from one immediate work request to the next driven by the notification stream of email and now chat.
Email may be open (maybe too open?) but it actually hides information. Both the way emails have become formatted, and the way email clients and servers work, cause the information in email to be lost. The noise in a typical email chain and the evolution of the discussion along forked paths, split, changed and edited to’s and cc’s, all make it hard to find the essence of the discussion and the actual information. Often various versions of a Word document are attached, some in sharepoint, some saved locally and attached to emails, and all with different comments/edits. These word documents point to the fact that documentation is required.
Email servers and clients, as well as the sheer number of emails (mostly noise), do not help in finding that needle in the email chain haystack. Often you can’t find the haystack, email search can be tricky at best.
You can (many do) organise your email into folders, but the almost complete removal of automatic email filtering in Outlook points to the notion that filtering is too hard for most, and manual moving of emails into the various folders is a chore that is left for too long, due to all the fires being put out and trying to understand the last email chain. Indeed the “New” Outlook initially had no way to drag emails from you inbox into another folder or into a directory.
Is there an answer?
No, not one answer for everything you use email for, but you can fix some of it…
Train yourself and teach others
Check your email a couple of times a day and turn off the notifications. This lets you focus on doing actual work (which may involve sending an email) and teaches others that you will respond as soon as you are ready to give it your attention. If it’s urgent, they can ring you (or send a chat message, but you know where that ends).
Use a collaborative tool
Word is a tool that has tried to become collaborative, but is really just a busy work maker (how many hours have you spent just trying to get the damn numbering to work)… No you need a real collaborative tool, like a wiki, for example Confluence. Confluence lets you create shared readable versioned documents with the ability to comment, collaboratively edit and control access as needed. And it’s always in the same place. The organisation of information is shared, you can create and control the way information is filed AND it is searchable.
Sometimes you get an innocent email that turns into something that should be a document, documentation. When this happens you need to be proactive and move it to your wiki. Indeed Togetha Software have an app for that called MailDrop for Confluence, just drag the email into confluence and the content is turned into a page ready to edit and clean up. In my experience you will need to do this a couple of times for the stragglers, but the sooner you shutdown the email trail the better. Put the information in a wiki where it can be found and discussed, and the information is front and centre.
A side benefit of Confluence is that it is content focused and not format focused, you can export to word or PDF from confluence to send out to clients or others without access to your collaborative space.
Could I use chat for that?
Ask could or should I use chat for that? Email is used for external communications, so you end up with advertising (footer banners), contact details, disclaimers etc. etc. in the “signature.” A signature really is a relic of the olden days of typed out letters that email replaced. The reader knows who sent the email, it is in the From field. So sending an email asking Joe to call Fred with three images and 20 lines of disclaimer/signature is a noisy waste of disk space and mental real-estate.
The answer is simple if you haven’t already discovered it, chat.
Chat lets you have a conversation asynchronously, and removes a lot of noise from email.
Beware that Microsoft is cluttering up chat the way it does everything in a bid to use featuritis to make it a “no brainer” to use Teams. With multiple paradigms making it a confusing mess of what channel should I use and making forays into the wiki space but reverting to form with Word-- editors. Don’t get me wrong, currently Teams is better than email if you want to ask Joe to call Fred, but beware the confused bloat-ware child is evolving. Simpler chat tools are better for productivity. Turn off chat notification while trying to do work, or it’s just another email.
All hail email?
Yeah, Nah as we say here in Aus. Email has its uses, and with Phishing, Spam, Newsletters, filling up the useful space, communicating with people outside your organisation is the sweet spot. Oh, and sending password resets.