If you applied the same rationale to speech or telephone use as you do to email, your argument would sound absurd. Why should it be valid for email? It’s just a medium.
I have Gmail (and Google Talk).
I get notifications, from none to a few, in the course of a day.
I NEED to reply to those emails to get my job done.
I disagree with your suggestion!
Ah that wonderful destroyer of rational thought, the email treadmill. I found that I had two email systems open at all times on my desktop, GMail for personal and then Outlook for work. I would compulsively check each many many times an hour, to the detriment on my main gig, which did not include obsessively checking email in it’s job description. I finally handled this by closing all e mail programs and only launching them three or four times a day. Usually after my boss called me asking the stupidest of all corporate questions “Did you get my e mail?”. Well if you pressed the send button, I can almost guarantee you that I did indeed receive it. Or my in-box did at least, even my pitiful IT department could do email properly. I usually found the the contents of the email were non life-threatening and usually pretty trivial. But he had to have that instant response there by affirming his managerial chops. Of course this entire exchange totally derailed whatever thought process I was currently entertaining so it wasted an hour or so until I could get back into that zone where code would just flow off my fingers like water off a ducks back, if I could ever get back there at all. Then my job devolved into simply checking my working programs, which took 5 minutes out of my day. Took me years to get to the point where my programming skills did my eight hours of work, leaving me for more important things, like Desk Top Tower Defense, and the occasional bug fix. The I went back to obsessively checking my email again, mainly because I was bored out of my freaking mind.
Hmm, sounds pretty similar to your other favorite tools twitter and stackoverflow. Really you aught to be careful what you point out, when your whole (stackoverflow) business model is based on variable rewards (up votes, badges, it’s all pretty exiting, will I get one today?)
Speaking of stackoverflow, I totally miss up-voting responses. Even Scott Adams has a voting system on his comments.
What, no oranges?
My problem is how to not spend all day on e-mail. I get more actionable e-mail than I can respond to in a 9 hour day.
The issue I have with this is, in our office, if we DON’T check our email every 5-10 minutes, we are told that we “aren’t keeping on top of things.” Makes it hard considering I have to break my concentration each time. Otherwise, I agree with your post.
The question about email is which is to be the master: you or the email system. If you feel like you have to check and respond all the time, it’s the master, and you’re not going to get much work done. If you are the master, then you check when is convenient to you, when you’re between stretches of concentration, and then you get all the communication since you last checked.
Use it wisely and it’s a very good tool, but you can also use it as a major distraction.
I agree with empi that there some important advantages to email that you skipped over (such as the audit trail aspect).
I was also suprised you didn’t take the opportunity to plug Stackoverflow when listing appropriate communication channels 
You also make some good points. The question is, does Google Wave suffer from all of the same issues?
How is Twitter going to solve this problem??? It’s even more text.
You know, some email clients use this wonderful invention called “slide notifications.”
Outlook and Thunderbird being two that I can think of that do this.
It shows you the sender and subject line of an email, then fades out after a few seconds.
Therefore, you can glance at it, see it’s not important, and continue working.
Or if it is important, make a mental note that when you’re finished with whatever you’re currently working on to look at it.
“Email problem” is in fact “Information overload problem”.
The solution is not to switch to different mediums, but to learn to treat emails more efficiently:
-
Learn to recognize spam and useless emails early.
Setup spam filters.
Teach people who email you to send you only useful emails.
The great way to teach it is NOT to reply to useless emails. -
Learn when to reply to email and when not to reply.
Even if you reply – be brief and to the point. -
If possible – put only one actionable request into one email.
I check my person e-mail once a day. Everything goes directly to junk, except for mail from people I know, or from news letters I subscribe (though the news letters go into specific folders and are read when I have time). My work e-mail address is only used for work, I do not give it out to anyone that is not directly related to my job, and I receive no spam or otherwise generally un-useful information. Perhaps it isn’t e-mail that is broken. Perhaps, you just do not use it correctly. I do not spend an inordinate amount of time sifting through garbage because all the garbage goes to my junk folder, which I empty weekly. Get yourself a personal e-mail address and share it only with friends and family. Use that address for standard communications. Use your work e-mail for work and get a public address that you can sift through occasionally. Learn to separate your e-mail, compartmentalize and e-mail works!
The whole internet is like that. There might be something important somewhere, hiding, eluding. But when you find it, profits!
I could not agree less. Sure my spam email account gets a ton of crap. My business email account gets only business emails. Email used correctly provides a perfect trail. It is not a bother or a nuisance. It is the preferred method of contact for almost every client I have and definitely mine.
I think the problem is more Twitter than email. Twitter addicts are the ones constantly cheeking to see if anyone cares that you had scrambled for breakfast. Reminds me of smokers, got to have that next fix. Have yet to see a tweet worth reading ever.
Yes Jeff I am talking to you. I listen to the podcast and you slide in a twitter comment all too often.
I agree with Jeff. Actually I’m a little bit surprised that some guys here don’t think email becomes a problem nowadays. Maybe they don’t receive a lot of emails everyday, or maybe they have special hacks to handle emails efficiently, or maybe their daily job is checking email, making decision and sending email…
My experience is that emails, especially in large enterprises, are distracting, especially when your job is not handling emails. Also sometimes email is not the effective way of communication. That’s why we need to consider other ways of communication and be cautious when writing emails.
Refreshing Stackoverflow every few seconds has nothing to do with this, right?
I use email because I can use it without a web browser, and web apps suck.
Part of the back-and-forth argument here is that there are (at least) two kinds of people when it comes to what constitutes an “interruption”.
For myself, oral (and aural) communication constitutes an entirely different mindset than written. When I’m heads-down programming (so I’m typing code into one window), I can fairly easily pop up another window, type in that one, and get right back to programming. Picking up the phone to make a call (or worse yet responding to someone walking into my cube) forces me to switch gears. Getting back to the code now takes much longer – I have to retrace my steps and re-create the chain of thought.
My boss, on the other hand, hates reading. Oral communication is always less intrusive to him than reading and responding to email. He had to teach me the evils of over-emailing. I’m much better now, but it’s always going to be my first gut reaction to email (and ask to be emailed).
What I’ve learned to do is a) consider the source (and target) of my communication and b) balance the personal convenience RIGHT NOW of firing off an email with the total amount of time gained from walking away from my cube and having a quick face-to-face to get all the info I need at once.
The advice in this article makes good sense when applied to someone who is a popular blogger, a creative professional, or some other form of self-employed independent contractor who has the luxury of choosing what to work on and when.
Sadly, though, it’s just not very realistic for the rest of us who have to work a regular 9 to 5 gig and have no choice but to respond on a schedule that someone else sets. For most, that’s a much bigger obstacle to overcome than any mountain of email.
We waited 18 days for this?