Is Email = Efail?

@Patrick - Well one of the problems with email is people like you, whose reading comprehension apparently sucks. Read the article again and figure out exactly what is being said. It is the amount of time and effort put into exactly these types of emails you describe that ends up burying people with it.

And whether or not That’s the worst email strategy possible is true, it’s exactly what people do, it’s not like Jeff said Email is ruining my life, please advise. It’s a common problem that affects most people who have jobs that don’t allow them the luxury of a half an hour spent per email response.

I’ve been battling towards Inbox Zero for well over a year… the closest I’ve gotten is 6 messages. After busting my ass this week, I’m down from 24 to 16. I’m hoping to nearly knock it out this weekend with the holiday. A rigorous filing effort has kept things moving nicely.

Anyway, one of the way I was able to filter out those little annoying messages was AwayFind - http://www.awayfind.com/ It makes sure the important things still get through to me and let me ignore the rest until I can deal with it.

My inbox currently has zero unread emails. I just dealt with everything I received overnight. (Mostly customer requests for bug fixes, new features, and that kind of thing). It took me an hour, but now I have the rest of the day to ignore incoming communication and get some actual coding done.

If you IM with clients all day, when do you actually get any coding done?

I need a few minutes just to get thinking about the problem I’m currently trying to resolve. If an IM arrives every couple of minutes (and that’s entirely possible since I’m actively working with 5 clients right now), then I’m reacting all day and I’d never get anything done.

I rarely answer my phone as well. I let it go to voicemail and respond on my schedule.

Its the only way I can get real concentrated work done.

I don’t like IM. I quit MSN years ago, and never looked back. IM distracts me when I’m working; email waits until I’m ready. Twitter seems like a horrible nightmare to me - thousands of people’s thoughts just popping up whenever they’re ready to share their wisdom with the world.

Email is manageable if it’s written correctly, which I agree is the problem. If someone sends you an email asking too much - just answer the core of it and let them ask another question if necessary!

I agree with Patrick above - I don’t want to hear your babbling stream of consciousness, I want a sensible composed message. And if you ask the wrong question… You get the wrong answer.

Surely that’s better than the hundreds of unread emails people are describing?

Use the appropriate communication medium

Message you need to compose, edit and refine before you send it : use email

Message you need to send now! - Use IM, Telephone, etc

Message you need to send for everyone to read whenever they are ready : Blog

People who use email for everything are the same ones who send 30MB files by email …

E-mail has a big advantage over IM that people like to forget:

When someone IMs me, I might be very busy and just have no time to take care of his request right now. Actually two peoples living on the opposite side of the earth have a huge problem finding a time frame that is suitable for both sides to chat.

E-mail, on the other hand, knows no such problem. I can send a mail when I have time myself to write it and the person on the other end can reply to it when he has time to do so. We can both stay within our own schedule and do things when we have the time for it without having to take the schedule of the other side into account. When I reply to it, he will read the reply when he has time to do so and not when I send the mail.

Also I can decide to not reply to an e-mail at all. It would be very impolite to just ignore an IM message in the same way! That is why so many people are actually connected to an IM network, but make their status hidden, so nobody sees that they are online.

Regarding 1. Channel that private email effort into a public outlet.

I cannot emphasize this one enough. At my company, they use mailing lists to communicate for the various projects. All the PMs and developers (supposedly) monitor their list and respond semi-officially to things.

There are two MAJOR problems with this method:

  1. Sheer email volume across the whole company. I read maybe 10% of the messages across the 15 mailing lists, but I have to subscribe to get them at all.
  2. I started working here in July. That means that I have a knowledge base that only starts in July. I can’t search on anything prior to when I started and subscribed to the lists. I’m an SE, so random customer questions about some deprecated feature consume much more time than they should because I have to ask another SE who has been here for 4 yrs to look in his stash. If we can’t find it, we ask the list. I can’t count how many times I’ve asked a question and gotten mildly chastised for repeating a question. I always respond saying I’m fairly new and have only seen the list for x months (and that I searched it first).

Again, internal message boards are the way to go (IMO) for these kinds of things. Everyone can post, everyone can answer, and the info goes nowhere. Everyone has an equal chance to search that info to find an answer.

Jaster nailed it. Like much in life, it’s all about using the appropriate tool for the task.

Email not scaling when you’re a popular blogger, though - I can see that =)

Wow. This is the first post of yours that I’ve read that I totally disagree with.

I obviously don’t deal with the daily email totals that you do, but I’m sure that the busiest days of my projects get into the same range, and I’ve never had difficulty keeping up. For me, Email is an asynchronous task list. My INBOX is my todo list. Nothing leaves my inbox until it’s dealt with, and it’s almost always nearly-empty. There are occasionally 2-3 things I need to think about more, but everything else is either
a) acted on (either go do the task or reply with a question/answer)
b) filed forever. (I don’t delete anything, but if I did, this is where you do it from.)

There is no middle ground. There’s no do later pile.

Now, on the user interface standpoint, you need to learn your keyboard shortcuts. Most IM clients fail, here. It takes longer for me to find a name in an IM list than it does to create a new email and send it. I don’t use the mouse unless I have to, and if you learn that, your interface complaints will be gone, too.

@Jonas: Yep. And checking back to read other people’s comments, too. define(_self, ‘numpty’);

Now I’ll be waiting for the blog post describing Twitter’s inability to scale as following 427 feeds and receiving dozens of @ replies results in a total communication breakdown…

Tatally agree with you. Whenever i am away for say a few weeks holiday, my mailbox is spilling over. I try to keep a constant eye on mail though and organise usually every t2o/three days.

Ow, and I am now using xobni, a great mail datamining tool (i know, sick right, actually needing to datamining your email :-S), and it’s free!

Can you reduce your email into a single paragraph? How about two sentences?

John Gruber normally responds in two words, which is pretty much spot on.

I can imagine Tantek has an issue with this, because he gets loads of e-mail. Thankfully I don’t, because no-one knows who I am. The idea that every e-mail should be responded to is sweet, but most e-mails have a person behind them.

Just like you don’t have to talk to a random person who approaches you on the street, you don’t have to reply to random e-mails, and I think it’s okay to say that.

Then again, as I say, I haven’t faced this problem myself.

What we can to combat the email
should be:
What can we do to combat the email

I had 777 unread messages last week. Tell me it’s not evil…

I may be behind in the times, but I still use e-mail as my primary means of communication (even with my wife, though I’d say that is NOT a good thing). I do not use Twitter or even an IM service, though my e-mail responses are as quick as though they had been IMs or tweets. Though I do not receive the same volume of e-mails as a popular blogger, I do have a substantial amount working in the software industry. I guess I just don’t understand how a person could get so far behind in their e-mails that they would have to spend so much time playing catch-up. If you are consistent in your response times, replying the moment you receive/notice an e-mail (the same as you usually would do an IM or a tweet), you should never build up such an enormous backlog.

Then again, I’ve got over 40 voicemails that are at least a month old… should have e-mailed me!

Moto

Can’t say I have the same problem. I like email and don’t get too much of it, but I’m not any sort of web celebrity or high ranking employee either. Most of my communication at work is through IM, which is quicker because you don’t have to wait minutes to get through. But it’s nice to have the record email provides… I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to go back and look something up out of an old email.

I feel like Twitter is rather limiting… words aren’t so bad, but they seem to think so.

In the military, we have to take operational security into account, so email remains the (unfortunately) best option. Most people cut through the fluff to make it work. One line (or one word) responses are usually the norm, and the time flexibility allows problems to be resolved even when there are four time zones involved, with an 11-hour separation between the most distant one. To cut through my own fluff, brevity is key.

Surely the plural of Hypothesis isn’t Hypotheses but Hypothesii…

Just a plug for my favorite email replacement: News Groups, as in NNTP (the close relative of SMTP). IT’s got all the advantages of E-Mail (in a proper client it actual looks like e-mail) and it’s public and (depending on how people run there servers) reasonably permanent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NNTP