We Need to Rethink Email - I have an idea...
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 5:28PM I've been a bit erratic on the posting lately... I guess it's email overload - I took 3 weeks out of my usual schedule, and in the meantime a rather substantial backlog accumulated. I'm overwhelmed and frustrated. It just reminds me of my disdain for the way we use email.
I gave a lecture to an executive MBA class two weeks ago, and asked them how they deal with email. The answers were borderline ridiculous (although enlightening)! These people have so much on their plates that they can't possibly deal with all the email that comes at them, so they need to make intuitive decisions about what to respond to... Which means that alot of opportunities are being missed. And they know it. One person in the class had four assistants to help her deal with her email - basically all she got to see of it was a small stack of printed notes every afternoon, which she would take home, makes notes on and then hand in to one of her secretaries to transcribe and send along. WTF!?
This problem isn't going away either. I can only imagine the email overload increasing over time as the web becomes more and more integrated into people's work and personal lives.
Solutions? Here are some common ones:
- More use of Instant Messaging,
- No email should be more than 5 sentences long,
- Use of Wiki's for planning among groups
- Every email should be actionable and concrete.
- Business and personal mail should be kept completely separate
- Use social-networking sites to catch-up with old friends or associates
- No more mass-mailing. Ever. Group info should be disseminated via RSS through a blog... if it's important for people, they will opt-in for as long as it remains so.
- If it's urgent, call.
I think an additional filtering option would be useful: what if your email inbox could be viewed as a tag-cloud rather than a list?
The sender would be obligated to tag/categorise their messages. Could this work?
UPDATE: Checkout Taglocity (thanks Maz)
Reader Comments (19)
I think it could work if, and only if, people were honest with their tags. Think about it i the context of Spam. If this were the case, the tags, then spam would tag their emails with tags that people would read: NB, WORK, MEETING etc etc, you know what I mean.
Same would apply for people looking for things from the people you talking about.
I am currently not favourable of human nature and human-kind in general. So I think it might be abused.
Surely the tags would be related to the subject at hand? Spam for Clear Spam? Collaborative filters for impending k*k? Think the concept Enormous for Corporates. We are all O*V*E*R*W*H*E*L*M*E*D. Anything for Less is more.
How many is a lot (borderline ridiculous)?
3000 a month?
I sent (typed) about 1400 last month. Typing obviously takes more time than reading. I don't really keep track of how many I receive since I delete some of the mailing list mail.
I use a text (only) email client and I touch type dvorak. I would be very impressed to see people do 2000 outgoing emails per month.. (using a GUI)
If I had to use tags to sort email it wouldn't really work for me, because certain issues or people me more frequently, so the one small important email could get lost. On the other hand I could tag an email as 'important', but then once I've dealt with it and its no longer important I would have to remove the 'important' tag. This would require too much effort for me though.
I do agree with separating business and personal email. It can cause confusion, clutter and time wasting as well. I also agree with calling, its so much quicker and more convenient.
I like your suggestions, but ja, like you said, it's one thing to tell people that's how they should do things, it's quite another thing to change the habit of doing things they've always been doing it.
The email idea, I think it would be a good idea to have the sender tag/categories emails, but having the emails in formatted in tag cloud format would only be of passing interest to me, as it's important for me to have my emails in date/time order and visualizing your emails in a tag cloud you'd have no perspective of time I think.
Mail filters and mailing lists are your friends. All my automated mails (from monitoring systems and such) goes into folders I look at when I need to. Various team mailing lists go into their own folders. I read my inbox once in the morning for about half an hour, skipping threads I have no interest in and then catch up on new stuff every couple of hours.
Basically, this is a human problem, not a tech problem. If you're getting hundreds of emails a day, you need to either train people not to send useless stuff or employ someone else to do some of the work. There's no easy solution.
Thanks for the feedback everyone....
Ok, so this idea needs to be fleshed out a little. But still, I think that we should have a relational alternative to hierarchical email organising. My friend Richard Brady suggested overlaying gmail with a Firefox plugin.
I'm feeling that it's not about how many emails I can send out every day... It's that email is taking up most of my productive time - I would rather be creating than responding.
How many people start their day by opening their email? something's not right
It appears people are reluctant to do business via IM and skype. Especially the older guard. It seems they deem it less professional.
Then again, if IM is used more frequently, surely it would only shift the problem from e-mail to IM.
Imagine the frequency of email on your IM. It would be disastrous.
The more I try to think of ways to eradicate the e-mail problems the more it appears to be the only real solution.
I think the problem isn't so much with reducing the amount of email we receive so much as prioritizing the emails that we do receive.
No.2 on your list has its own website!
Read http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/07/fight-email-overload-with-sentences" rel="nofollow">Mike Davidson's post on his email frustrations and the solution to it - http://five.sentenc.es/
Id say on a corporate level to avoid spam, have an automatic tag in the signature, to id that its not spam
So funny to read this..I decided this morning I hate emails!There are so many better ways of communicating now-a-days. I'm all in for the tags Dave. Your idea's genius.
The need for efficient freelancing
I actually spoke to Dave (over a nice cup of coffee) on Friday about the need to be more productive in terms of reading and responding to e-mails, before I saw just now that he had actually already blogged about it… Considering that I responded t...
Dude, then why do I hardly see you on IM?
Have you seen the Inbox Zero series:
http://www.43folders.com/izero
the only problem is that the above takes too long to read... and my inbox is still full.
Since it's a huge issue, I get the feeling there'll be a critical mass response/solution very soon, and overload will become history (please, let's make it happen).
Maybe use the subject field and auto-file incoming messages into mailboxes according to tag? This can only take off if either:
1. if email clients prompt people to add tags;
2. if everyone starts doing it.
@Henk: I'm getting there bro! Miss you okes!
@Dave: thanks for that. I see one of my business partners is using a window's based project management system that automatically categorises his emails according to the subject line. It works - but not in gmail yet unfortunately.
tags and clouds and email and outlook:
http://www.taglocity.com/
you may have seen this by now.
but its a cool concept: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/
Thanks G. Yep, I'm a Mozilla fan. And I have the Thunderbird sticker on my laptop to prove it:D