So you are saying that you have not posted in 2 weeks because you have been checking email obsessively?
I think I may prefer the rat to some coworkers; any idea where I can get one trained?
I disagree. I’d much rather send/receive email. That way I have a written record of what was said and can review that record. This is very important when I’m given a task to perform. My boss may ask me to make a black widget. After several days of building the widget I may not remember whether to paint it blue or black (my boss may not remember either). Then I can review that email and know to paint it black. Then when the boss says, “No, I told you to paint it green”, I can point to the email and defend myself. This can save me a lot of time and arguement.
Plus, our culture has demanded that we answer the phone when it rings. This interrupts my chain of thought significantly. Even if I choose to ignore the phone, the ringing still interrupts my thought process. I’m a programmer. Perhaps I have just loaded a complicated algorithm in my brain and am trying to sort it out. Incoming email won’t bother me. The phone…
I tend to disagree with your post too. Well, in essence you are right and we should stop sending email in cases where it is not the best medium. Still, I agree with most of the others that the alternatives you define (phone calls, twitter, forums, etc) are not better at all. They are more fragmented, and unlike email, there’s a chance nobody ever sees it.
Email is not the problem, workforce trends are. A few things are going on. Where we used to have location-specific departments in the same room, we now have colleagues across the globe. We outsource things which opens yet more information and communication channels. Information size is exploding and we are expected to multi-task like crazy. Our networks grow from a few local guys to hundreds of people from all over. We work across timezones.
I could go on, but I think it is clear that the amount of email you get is not because of email. It is because of the amount of communication channels and the size of your network.
Finally, you are also ignoring the fact that email is used as much more than just a communication medium. It is also used as a planning system, a document management system, a discussion forum, a legal repository (to put things in writing), etc, etc.
“Email is dead” posts I have seen for years already. This is just another one. The reality is that email is still increasing. Twitter will not fix it, nor Google Wave, because they cannot fix the problem. The problem is not the tool, it is the inevitable growth of our networks and therefore our communication channels.
I agree with the other folks here. I actually make a point to tell my staff (I’m in IT), NOT to call me. I don’t pick up the phone and check my VM only once a day. If anything, the concepts here apply to VoiceMail more than email. I mean, talk about a productivity waster!
Pick up the phone, dial the VM. Wait for attendee. Dial password. Listen to new message count. Press 1. Wait for whoever it is to say hello, and work up the nerve to ask me whatever it is they need. And deal with their ridiculously thick accent most of the time. And then I have to take notes!! That’s an interruption.
And I don’t check email, it notifies me. And I have a record of everything that was requested. It’s like letting the requester take the notes for me!
Not to mention it’s non-intrusive. I don’t have to worry about whether the person is busy, or in a meeting, or even in the office (Thanks to Blackberries). They can be alerted to my question and answer at their earliest convenience. No worrying about scheduling face-time.
In fact, when I DO get verbal requests, I always instruct the person to “write me an email”, so I can check back and the end of the day and see if I have forgotten anything.
I think there are things in the office environment that are much bigger time wasters than checking email.
Personally, I would like a cappachino IV and catheter.
@Phenwoods: I am not denying the fact that phones or personal visits are distracting. In fact, you should probably turn off or mute your phone, shut the door etc. when you have something important to work on.
Nothing is going to happen if you do.
You might think checking email only takes seconds; but remember that even if you stop working just for half a minute to read that new email, you will need at least 15 minutes to get into the “flow” again, which means that every email/notification you read might cost you a lot more time than you realize.
Now I want to say that what I write here mostly applies to creative work. Maybe what you do doesn’t require getting into the flow; but from my experience as a designer, having prolonged periods of time with NO distractions whatsoever is the only way to produce anything of value.
Jeff is making several points here, actually. First, the biggest problem is checking your email constantly, as if it’s going to deliver a present at any moment. Instead, it just interrupts your “flow” and your ability to get real work done. I suffer from this and thanks to Jeff for the reminder that I need to cure myself.
Second, email really isn’t a great medium for some work. Face to face conversation is a lost art. People often resort to sending a five page email that the recipient won’t read rather than have an actual conversation in person or on the phone (yeah, I know this can be difficult between time zones, but how many times do you IM or email the guy in the next cubicle with something important? Too many.) Then the recipient will ignore your monster email precisely because it’s so long and complicated. Sometimes it’s better to have the conversation and follow it up with an email so there’s a record of the decision that was made. On top of that, you never know what you’ll find out when you actually talk to someone - new product plans, layoffs coming, new hires, etc., plus the commeraderie that it builds. Email is overused and abused. It’s not bad and it’s the right answer sometimes, but it’s the default, and not always appropriate.
I see your point(s), but email actually makes me more productive. Its biggest benefit, as mentioned here above, is that it’s asynchronous. It does not interrupt me nearly as much as a phone call or a meeting or the random colleage wandering over to my cube.
Email, IMs, Facebook, BLOGS, RSS Readers, Twitter, MEETINGS, MySpace… and the like = MASSIVE TIME SINKS and are not in any way productive.
Hey Now Jeff,
Stop Sending Emails, thx 4 the info!
Coding Horror fan,
Catto
These blog posts get more and more pointless as the weeks go on…
Another thing about face-to-face meetings. People love to gather in the conference room to stroke the ego of themselves and each other by yapping away, but how often do you leave a meeting with nothing to show for it?
Most times I meet with people there are only a few people taking notes, and that usually stops about 5 minutes in. Personally, I don’t even bother bringing a pad with me anymore. I’d rather listen than jot.
And yet, when the meeting is over, I remember all being in agreement about… something. But don’t really know what my gameplan is or what the actionable items were. I usually have to send post-meeting emails, to verify that I came away from the meeting with the right info.
So if I have to ask via email what to do, what actual good was the meeting in the first place?
I always leave the gmail tab open in my browser the whole day so I am not exactly hitting ‘check for new mail’ often. But I do agree email occupies major portion of a pie chart that shows causes of information overload. Gmail took a major step forward towards organizing email and email management - that of grouping related conversations by subject and providing a single email store called ‘archive’ that could do ‘catch-all’ that you wouldnt have to worry about.
Until additional approaches to overcoming the flood of incoming email are tried, we wont know if they would work or not. Some of the thinks I can think of (in the context of gmail or other web based email app) are as follows. In my idea, there are no folders or labels concept, you only have one thing to look at in your visual radar - the ubiquitous inbox. But there can be multiple views of viewing the inbox by using selective filters.
- Priority emails - If you get purchase notifications from your website via email (paypal payment notifications, server down notifications from your website monitoring service, emails from your business partner, etc.), you want to attend to them first so there needs to be a way to make them appear at the top of the inbox (using some filter criteria). Uptill now the only parameter of how email filters operate is by sending incoming email into folders or labeling them but that requires one extra step of navigating into that folder and contributes to visual clutter because you have a growing number of folders that immediately appear in your visual field and you start feeling overwhelmed. Setting up labels for filtering them into different folders spreads the areas to be viewed and clicked into multiple levels of action that requires human effort expense.
- Sticky emails (bookmarked emails) - Emails that you can mark as ‘needing further action’ need to have a way so that they always appear at the top of the inbox.
- Multi-level tree-structured labels/folders with drilldown but you dont have to set up the labels first - the email program should set this up automatically. Gmail only allows you a top level classification in the form of labels. The tree would be built by different columns of the email database which you can choose.
By Sender->expanding tree->Click Sender->Inbox view only shows all correspondence to/from sender. You could do this with ‘from:’ search inside gmail. Or instead of occupying a visual area created by a tree structure, there can be a better option thought out.
By Filed Tags that you assign to emails->So you could group unrelated conversations into threads if you assign the same tag to multiple email threads. In gmail, conversation threading can happen only if the subject matches. But lets say you want to assign tags to emails so you could group #webdesign related emails in one bunch even if the word ‘web design’ doesnt appear anywhere in the email - #webdesign is a user associated tag - any fast to recall, easy to remember tag would do. This way this is different from a standard ‘search filter’ that filters email by search phrase ‘web design’.
Able to edit emails for brevity and save them - people send lot of trailing ">"s that are simply regurgitations of existing, previous emails, there need to be a way to wiki-ize and remove repetitions, add pertinent infos and save the structure as it appears modified. (but it wont be compatible with existing mail protocols like smtp/pop3 etc). May be there needs to be a self-editable private wiki which you can build like a chronological log of correspondences on a particular subject etc by copy pasting email text and deleting the redundant text and adding any information you find meaningful. Then you could delete the emails you no longer need because you’ve copied the data you want to keep for perpetual record in the form of a wiki (or other note taking app). In short email data needs to be moved out of the inbox into a more manageable, queryable at high speed form, and then the corresponding emails deleted from the inbox. This contributes to the ‘clean slate’ ‘fresh start’ feeling (called zero inbox personal productivity method). With a blank mind, you can be more productive rather than with a cluttered mind just as if the mind copies what it sees and visualizes it - a cluttered overloaded inbox = a cluttered overloaded already occupied brain that cant accept anything more.
- Calendar-based email navigation or some other method that only shows a subset of emails and other emails are hidden from the current view. Much like in Google’s Web History view. If you click a date on a calendar then only correspondences on that date will be displayed. This way you can always keep up with a ‘cut off date’ of emails that you ahve attended to. ‘All emails up to and including 03-29-09 I have gone through and attended and there is no further action required on them’ - > then those can be moved to the wiki-type email archive and removed the inbox once and for all.
I advise everyone to view Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0
And also, if you like it Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
We ( developers ) loose productivity on their rampage to check and check email, even if it’s only notifications. You break away from you mindset and it takes time getting back there.
Regards,
cool story, bro
I think Jeff’s not talking about receiving email as the reward. He’s talking about receiving juicy email that’s the reward. So yeah, I’ll see a badge on my mail app’s icon when I have new mail, but do I have my mail app set to check frequently, and am I constantly glancing down at that badge, and when I do have new mail, do I feel compelled to look at it right away, and when I do look at it, am I hoping for certain kinds of “fun” messages?
A similar example would be constantly checking Facebook. Or, say, constantly reloading a blog page hoping someone responded to my comment.
P.S. I never had any interest in those apps that check mail for you – the idea seemed silly – but if I can see at a glance the subject lines of recently arrived emails without going into my mail app, this might serve as a kind of methadone or nicotine patch for email addiction.
So…what does it mean if I obsessively check CodingHorror to see it there’s a new blog post.
“Cheese, please…cheese, please…cheese, please…OH YEAH! MORE CODINGHORROR CHEESE!!!”
“…the biggest problem is checking your email constantly, as if it’s going to deliver a present at any moment.”
So why not turn on notification?
“On top of that, you never know what you’ll find out when you actually talk to someone - new product plans, layoffs coming, new hires, etc., plus the commeraderie that it builds.”
Face to face has its place, but I think the above shows why it can be more of a loss to prouductivity than email. A question that could have been answered in a couple of minutes, ends up as a whole morning’s gossip. Killing productivity for everyone in hearing range.
Another advantage of email over face to face, is that it’s possible to cc everyone who needs to be involved in the conversation. Without email it’s too easy to miss an important decision just because you were out of the office when a conversation too place.
Did anybody else notice that all the people that defended emails wrote long replies?
I think that your day to day job defines how you deal with e-mail.
Some people are working heads down on a coding a new feature or fixing a tough problem. For them e-mail is a distraction. (Jeff you appear to be in this boat.)
Other people are in the problem triage area. They are getting messages from various streams and need to sort it all out to keep the team moving forward. Some people might call this the manager of a team but there are also other team members that are in this mode, think about handling issues with support and installation (yea, someone has to do this work.)
For those that are in the problem triage area e-mails is really useful. It provides a searchable record of what is going on and who is involved. Phone calls and meetings are too ephemeral for a some communication.
I’m still trying to see how Twitter is useful for all this. Some people keep a separate monitor dedicated to a twitter client. How is that not distracting? Also you can’t use twitter for internal communication about general company business. Jeff, you have it good here, Stack overflow is generally quite public in concept, you can’t do that with most companies.