Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine

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I have to disagree with this article. I think it might be because I use instant messaging, phone conversations, text messages, and e-mail all for different purposes so maybe I am not experiencing this problem. I get mail pushed to my mobile devices, and I don’t constantly check it. I actually used to be more obsessive about checking my mail back when I had to open a mail client on my phone or use the browser on the device to check (circa 2007). I guess I differentiate between slow mediums such as e-mail and phone rather than instant mediums such as texting and messaging.

Because of this, I cannot agree with this article at all from my own perspective, but I do know what you mean in a corporate prespective. I’ve many times gotten 100 e-mails about something. Instead of having an IM system setup to handle that or a program that just pops up in the bottom right annoying you with these requests or making beeping noises, most people just forward all of that to e-mail. You’re extremely right on about how people multipurpose e-mail. The problem is that e-mail isn’t design for most of these purposes and is probably the worst method of accomplishing these methods. Worse yet, most companies pile everything into one account rather than many so all 100 e-mails are for 100 different programs and tasks that have no relation to one another.

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I would also be interested to see a post explaining how Twitter solves the information overload problem. Other than the fact that it sort of absolves some of the guilt of not replying – the ephemeral nature of the Twitter feed seems to make it a little more plausible to use the excuse that you “missed” something – I don’t really see much difference compared to email. And a fairly major downside of the ephemeral nature of Twitter is that it’s difficult for people to know whether someone has already asked a given question 10 times.

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Unfortunately, most bosses believe that all of their questions require “an urgent, immediate answer”

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I wholeheartedly agree with this!

I always have my iPhone on vibrate. Just a week or two ago, I went into my notification settings and turned Email notification off. I check my iPhone enough anyhow, it doubles as my watch, and when I respond to texts and phone calls. Now when my phone vibrates, I know it’s because someone is trying to get ahold of me directly.

My life has actually been quite a bit happier with email notification turned off.

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I can;t believe no one has already pointed out that Jeff, being a somewhat internets celebrity is probably deluged by more email that most of us. Jeff apparently can;t figure out that his situation (either compulsion to check updates) or the fact that he gets more correspondence than others, doesn’t necessarily translate to the entire world, or even all other developers.

Oh well. In general it is good advice to keep reviewing your daily habits and practices to cut out waste. Blindly following some “guru’s” advice on the internets is not the best way to do this.

What works for Jeff probably won;t work for you and what works for you doesn’t work for Jeff…

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Great article! I just forwarded it to all my friends :slight_smile:

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E-mail can become a hindrance, if you can’t control yourself. It really is just another medium for communication, it’s not like you can’t get carried away by not wanting to get off of the phone either. The real problem is priorities and keep them in balance.

So I do think time management might have been a more valuable aspect to look at, instead of just saying e-mail is bad.

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There are several issues here.

  1. Distraction

Compulsive email checking and real-time notifications are distracting for many. And hopefully it’s socially acceptable within your workplace and/or among your friends to curb such distractions.

It should be reasonable to expect email to function asynchronously. Simply, none of us should expect a reply the same day. And certainly not within moments. Unfortunately, many disagree.

  1. Email as a Medium

Email has many failures:

  • Privacy
  • Authentication
  • Urgency
  • Collaboration (backlog of “>>>>” and ridiculous subject prefixes “RE: FWD: Re: RE: Fwd:”)
  • Versioning
  • Archive/Organization

SPAM, phshing, and inbox clutter are all symptoms of the failures above.

Needed improvements:

  • asymmetric encryption
  • reliable priority/importance flags
  • formal conversation/discusstion entities
  • attachments should probably be disallowed outright in favor of FTP hosting
  • shared, editable labeling/tagging
  1. Etiquite

Email isn’t going away anytime soon. What can we all do today?

Email (especially in the workplace) should be crafted with as much care as is given to printed communication.

  • use meaningful subjects
  • make the purpose obvious
  • usually request only one action per email
  • emphasize the action requested
  • keep it short and simple
  • check spelling
  • proofread

Just about zero of my coworkers agree agree with any of this. :frowning:

  1. Alternatives

Does anything exist on the market right now or in the near future that will help?

GMail labels, conversation grouping, and archive features are all good patches on top of the broken system.

Various encryption solutions exist, but they’re uncommon and far from standardized.

We can escalate/deescalate or otherwise transfer communication to a different, hopefully more appropriate medium:

  • Telephone
  • Voice Mail
  • Instant Message
  • SMS
  • Wiki
  • Blog
  • Bulletin Board
  • Discussion Group
  • Social Network
  • Media Sharing Site
  • Collaborative Editor
  • Bug Tracker

These each have their pros and cons.

The big problem: It’s difficult to organize different types of information within a single system. Within multiple, it’s a nightmare.

That said, the Google Wave demo video is quite impressive. Whether it ultimately works as advertised, it is still movement in the right direction.

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“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.”

Exactly. On a day when I get a dozen email requests for help, I am still generally very productive throughout the day. On a day when people stop by to ask questions two or three times in the day, my day is completely ruined.

Yes, there’s a point where our email skills fail us and one face-to-face meeting works better than a dozen emails (note: getting ten people on a conference call is almost NEVER better than an email chain or Wiki page for communication, but face-to-face communications can exceed written words). But, IMHO, those are both far between and trainable. Exercise your written communication muscles and maybe you’ll see some improvement!

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I want my email provider to send me a Tweet when email arrives…

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What spam? I have almost never received spam on my office email address. (Except for the occasional Dominos discount mailer. But I dont mind that).
But if you are in the habit of tossing around your email address at all possible occasion you get then you are in trouble. And I must say gmail does an excellent job at filtering spam from my personal email. So no spam there either.

So its safe to say that all the mail I get on my official email account was mail that was supposed to come to me. But then there is always the endless 10 page droning about some mind numbing trivial issue at work which people insist on solving by sending emails only.

I am usually CC’d on most such emails.

Solution: Select All > Right click > Mark as read.

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It scares me to think that you propose 10 different ways to deal with situations (Ie. Kudos, send it to a notice board, etc).

Email is still the defacto standard when it comes to communicating with most interfaces, I would worry that any other could fall through the cracks.

Until a better method comes out I’m sticking with email. We do need to get rid of spam mail though…

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I received this link on my Gmail WebClip

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I agree with the recommendations for dealing with incoming mail, but not for replacing it with other forms of communication. As far as distractions go, email is far less of one than phone (requires immediate response), face to face (requires immediate response, sometimes ending up at someone else’s desk), IM (annoying flashing windows for such messages as “lol”) and meeting (large chunk of time taken up trying to stay awake while listening to other people discuss topics of no interest to you). It is no worse and quite possibly better than using a public forum, which will have no better notification method than your email system and as others have mentioned, can result in the same addictive refreshing that you blame on emails. Also, using email as the primary communication tool, even if it’s not the optimal medium for most forms, means that only one place needs to be checked for messages and a search for old communication (which I have to do regularly because that’s how long it takes to get things done in public service) needs to only be performed in the one place.

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I think the article is spot on: e-mail is the ultimate productivity killer.

I have no idea how any of you e-mail lovers manage to do any real work done while being constantly notified about new stuff in your inbox. It’s certainly not possible if you are a designer, a programmer, or any other creative professional.

Checking e-mail periodically throughout the day, which Jeff recommends — even as often as once an hour — allows you to have periods of distraction-free time, which can be used for creative work. You can never fully focus on a task if you know that a new email might arrive any second.

Regarding the “Stop sending email” part: I wouldn’t say it is realistic to think that all the people, who just mastered using e-mail a couple of years ago, will suddenly start utilizing tools like blogs or Twitter accounts; but this is going to happen once everybody learns that it’s easier to create a Facebook event for a party than Cc 30 people from their address book.

Jeff, this is a great article and you are clearly ahead of the game; keep creating.

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I can’t understand the logic here… maybe the point was misrepresented but it sounds like you propose using (and as a result, checking) 10 different mediums instead 1 to save time and increase productivity?

Here’s a better idea:

  1. Don’t use twitter, don’t use facebook, don’t use myspace - save that for your own time.
  2. Don’t sign up for all kinds of crap online, you won’t get so much spam.
  3. Install a proper spam filter.
  4. Do your job.

I think the differentiating factor here to note is that you’re writing largely for software developers, but you’re not one - at least not only one. You are a ‘public figure’, you market your software/websites via things like facebook/twitter/blogs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most developers don’t do those things, and the argument doesn’t really apply.

Case in point: I get maybe 20 e-mails/day. About 15 of which are fogbugz auto-mails about things that do need to be looked at/prioritized. The rest don’t even get a second glance past the outlook system tray popup until my break.

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My Outlook has its own monitor so I can see my inbox all the time - and can decide if the mail in it is important enough to action.

I can effectively check my email without any more effort than sweeping my gaze to the right.

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I put “checking for email” in the same category as “looking at my email to see what came in”. Of course I have new mail; I’m not dead and the internet connection is working. I don’t need some stupid red badge on the dock icon or a noise or worst of all a jumping visual alert.

The point here is that unless my actual work is fielding every message the moment it comes in - an online receptionist or help desk role - I should be able to ignore email for at least one & maybe two of my focused, productive chunks of time. Those time lengths vary by job - shorter for project managers (some but not all of the time), longer for programmers - but healthy company cultures expect heads down, flow time without trivial interruptions.

If there’s something of higher priority AND urgency than what someone is accomplishing in their current focused chunk, then that interruption should come by phone, in person, or - if company culture has agreed that IM is a near-immediate interruption - by IM. (IM does have the distinct advantage over the phone of allowing you to finish the thought you were on or make a note of it before you respond).

The benefits of not allowing email to be defined as an interruption are huge.

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Yay! Catto’s back.

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Email’s great… it’s a fairly standard, centralised place to receive all your notifications and communications.

Install an auto-checking mail notifier, and you no longer need to faff around clicking on “check mail”. The computer tells you when there is some.

To become more productive, you need to syphon everything into email. Get email notification of your Facebook profile, Twitter direct messages, blog replies, etc.

That way you get told when there is some new information, rather than having to pull the much much worse one-arm-bandit lever of “are my Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/forums/blog replies containing new information yet?”. And get an RSS reader so that it takes mere seconds to work out if there’s new content on your favourite blogs.

Habitually clicking on “Gmail” every ten minutes is one thing, but it’s not as bad as constantly cycling through ten websites and social networking sites in the hope of new pointless drivel to read.

It’s easy to “defend” against the constant onslaught of pointless email and updates that aren’t important. The world is good at sorting mail, it’s done it for decades.