re: Email = Efail, email is just a tool, and like any tool can be used effectively, or misused. Most of the time, when a tool is misued, it’s not the tool that’s at fault.
We just need to learn how to use email effectively, which will differ for each circumstance. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to just delete them, whether read or unread. Other times, a short reply is called for. And then there are times when a well thought out, composed response is required.
Now you run a software company, did you hire the laziest people you can afford? 
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000237.html
Pre-processing rules help with this a lot. Outlooks sorts my incoming emails into categories, and then I go through those categories when I have time to think about those particular items.
I am also quick to delete anything that I know does not require a response.
There are ways to deal with email. However, a big part of that would be discouraging people from sending you email you don’t want. For me, a good way to do that is to have three email addresses. One for work, one for home and one for registering at sites that you know will spam you.
Anything that I actually pay for goes in my home emails. Anyone sending to the wrong email address can either be ignored or politely asked to send them somewhere else.
Of course, publicly posting your email address on the web changes everything.
@Robert - don’t understand the hostility, but that aside:
When a coworker comes to me with a question, he is interrupting my flow. I am going to make a judgment: Is this guy wasting my time? How much of his own time did he invest first?
Did he look into the history, find the related bug reports, read the documentation and the code to get the facts and background? In other words, has he correctly arrived at THE QUESTION? The question he cannot answer but I can? And is the question clear, pure, well-formed, and ready for my answer? Or do I have to sort it out of a muddled jumble? I don’t care if it’s an email, phone call, or pop-in, he’s got to spend the time getting ready to ask for my time.
If not, he is wasting my time to save his own, and I will take note of this.
Doing his homework before bothering me isn’t a luxury, it’s his damn job.
I don’t see how some off-the-cuff incomplete-context IM that jerks me out of what I’m doing is a good use of anyone’s time.
Now, there is such a thing as a ping where this coworker is trying to save 2 hours of his time in exchange for 30 seconds of mine, but those are not the sprawling emails decried above.
If you need to write a sprawling email, you NEED to spend 30 minutes on it. It’s both disrespectful and unlikely to get results otherwise.
Do I sound like much of a curmudgeon? Well I am, to the people wasting my time. To the people who don’t, I am that guy who goes the extra mile to get the full complete backstory and make sure the issue we’re tackling is well understood and being handled in the best way.
Will it be good to enable email application like outlook to autoreply each email with the time elapsed after the user has last responded and the number of unread emails in the inbox… info on the current emails position in the queue. What do you think?
Scale your choice of communication method to the type of conversation you’re having
I agree with that one, the rest is BS.
Have you read the four hour work week? It has a great take on email, basically only check it twice a day at most, 11:00am and 4:00pm.
Also, Yammer is a great way to get people to use less email.
Good luck in your email filtering.
This is very, very true. I haven’t sent an email in a year or so from my email account - it’s redundant for me, to be honest. Everyone I want to talk to I talk to using Instant Messengers.
Don’t forget the classic endorsement of email:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. - Donald Knuth
Geek fail!
I can’t imagine moving my email communications to public forums. While that works if your business is writing a web browser or public web service (like you two) and you want to discuss that, it doesn’t work so well for the rest of us.
A lot of my friends and family have no cell phone, have never heard of Twitter, don’t read blogs, and/or only check email once or twice a week. USENET would be as valuable as IM.
Hypothetically, if everybody I know used Twitter / cellphones / the same IM network, then sure, that might be less mental overhead. But it’s a boil-the-ocean solution: once you add on remember what network I have to use to contact $NAME, email is easier. I write short quick emails, and I never have an IM client open when I’m trying to do work, so they’re equal, apart from the fact that IM does a much worse job of organizing past messages.
the river pebble metaphor is good.
Email can still be effective with certain people. Maybe its similar to personal conversation, in that it works well, when it does, but its often prone to impedance mismatch, which causes frustration.
It seems like you’re essentially blaming the messenger here. You have email building up, but how many of those emails would be conversations, or phone calls resulting in post-it notes should email cease to exist?
I have no problem with my normal emails, I respond to every one right when I get it and overall it saves time as I don’t have to deal with the person asking a ton of follow up questions or anything like that.
The only ones that build up are tasks which require me to change some code, or write something new. Those would build up anyway, regardless of the medium.
Maybe you’re buried not because you’re getting email, but because you have too much work to do.
I’ve been in this boat and really appreciate the pebbles analogy from Merlin. While it’s often not enough, I’ve found that batching email (i.e., Inbox Zero / GTD approaches) is a big help. The key is to focus on email at one specific time (maybe twice per day) and then not check it the rest of the time. However, to do that effectively one needs a separate task list than their email…otherwise there will inevitably be things that just sit in one’s inbox and waste our mental energy every time we see and don’t deal with them. So yeah, task list = key. And inbox task list.
A few people forwarded me this post, and Keith Casey mentioned he used AwayFind. It’s a little tool I built to help people batch email (i.e., not check it all the time) but still get notified via SMS if there’s an emergency (without giving out one’s cell phone.). That’s the extent of my pitch, but feel free to try it at http://awayfind.com, the free version is all you’d likely need.
I don’t think email = efail, because I don’t think email is a technology problem. Like most people here have been sharing, it’s a matter of how we write emails and how we deal with them. We’ve got a long way to go in learning both sides of that, but hopefully we can get the word out to the people we work with sooner than later so that we can actually achieve inbox zero from time to time.
i rarely recieve email from human beings. my email is for news letters bulletins and updates. i get pissed off to find social drivel in my mailbox!! cousin so and so saying hi. dad saying to fix the friggin light bulb and such like.
however, until i gave up on the infantile shinanigans on SO, i found that jeff responded to EACH AND EVERY EMAIL i sent!!! and this despite me mailing from a gmt offset of 9hrs!!! jeff, you rock at email response.
Shame on you Jeff, such a lazy sweeping generalisation of email. You missed so many useful points of email, especially that is offers a nice audit trail for covering your arse (especially in a corporate environment!). What about keeping attached items in the context they were sent, efail? Ediot more like it!
Sure, you can get a lot of pebbles, but doesn’t everybody?
IM has a critical mass before it becomes an unusable platform and Twitter is ok for nothing more than short status updates.
I have to disagree with you on this one Jeff, is there a bigger problem here?
Emails for the most part is an information thread or tasklisk that is required of you. If you feel like you are falling behind, perhaps you are taking on more that you can handle?
I don’t understand, why you even ask for more email?
Also rss-feeds are sometimes too heavy. I have 1000+ news in one of my news feeds that I should read. It is always 1000+, because I don’t have time to read as much news as news people produce them. In fact, I don’t have time to even read the titles.
I use GMail and Google Reader. They have been very good, and integrated with a link.
One more tip: no rich text. Keep it old-fashioned: just plain Ascii text (although if your language requires it, you may use accented characters). No bold. No italic. No fonts. No tables.
That way you can focus on the message, and indeed keep it short, thus, keeping away from making it too long.
It’s only yesterday that I last sent a mail to an old-fashioned mailing list, first time in a long while, and it hit me how fast and smoothly it went.
@Patrick - Apologies for the harsh remarks, it was morning and I was busy clearing out the 100 or so messages that had accumulated in my inbox overnight… also the coffee machine broke.
What you are describing is a perfect world, where people do their research and their homework and don’t bother you with trivial questions… but it happens, and it happens a lot. We don’t work in bubbles and people are expected to collaborate and share information. And if it takes an hour of my time to save someone else 4 hours of digging through documentation, then there is a net gain to the team. It may annoy me, but we’ve collectively come out ahead.
On top of all this is what we call the dreaded email trail. I may be involved in 5 projects with conversations flying around between Analysts, PMs, BAs, Testers etc. (And everyone ‘Replies All’)… BUt I’m still expected to stay current with the goings on. In this case, a Wiki or a newsgroup or a forum or whatever is CLEARLY a superior method of sharing information than is email.
This whole blog post is absurd. Faulting email because you are now flooded is just silly. Email continues to work fine for me, so it’s obviously not email that’s broken. In fact, I’ve stopped any form of IM since it’s a productivity killer.
When your situation changes then you must change with it. You’ll have to change the way you deal with things, and that may include shifting to new tools. And the situation you face may be new to you, but it’s not new. In essence it’s been around for a long time, and various successful ways of dealing with it have evolved. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to think of some. If you get stuck, just ask and I’ll try to check back some time soon.