Jeff Atwood writes an excellent and well-needed post on my least favorite technology: email
Coming out of corporate america, email is, above all, the most misunderstood, poorly executed communications medium available. In fact, I’d rank email below Twitter. Or maybe Twitter is getting bumped up higher because of its restrictive nature.
So, let me be clear:
Email has a use. I use it when I need to convey information in writing that might generally be too long or complex to write out in a chat client or when I need to formulate a response that can’t be given immediately that will take more than a sentence or two.
Whenever I see an email that consists of one or two lines, I cringe. When I have someone ask me if I read the ‘email’, I cringe. I cringe because it adds weight to Jeff’s point. It also reinforces my long standing habit of *not* reading email *unless* someone asks me about it. Why? I find it much faster to actually use email. I can sift through my email when needed rather than as a trained monkey pulling a lever.
Now, in corporate American, if you really want to anger a boss make him or her constantly ask whether you got the email. They hate it. But that one second of asking saves me countless hours non-productivity. Instead of wasting precious time organizing, managing, and cleaning up, I just wait until it is asked. I call it Just-In-Time-Annoyance-Email.
Let’s just say this approach is *not* an efficient approach *at all*. But I’ve been witness, and party to, using email as a chat client – something it is clearly not designed for. I think anyone who has worked in a production capacity in an IT shop knows what it is like when something blows up. Emails start flying everywhere. You have someone who changes the subject or fails to follow a protocol in the subject line and then you have a gigantic mess on your hands. Then you have streams of conversations that become circular – or even worse, conversations that break off into their own little world where nothing is communicated at all. Add on to all of this the massive FAIL committed by someone abusing mailing lists and you have one fine mess.
I’ve even thought about setting up a mail filter that works much like a challenge-response system for spam. Basically, you have to pay me to read your email unless I manually override it (i.e. you tell me I need to read the email). This would get me around people sending me useless emails devoid of any substance because an actual, tangible cost is incurred in the form of money. Now that would be cool.
