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The Tyranny of Email
Circuit Breaker writes "Are you or your co-workers using email instead of phone, face to face conversations, or instant messaging? Read this article, and hand out copies to your mates."
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...in the last 5 years has been like this: people emailed their colleague in the next cubicle rather than just leaning over to talk to them. What's new?
I find that using email makes me more efficient by allowing me to have multiple conversations at once, as well as see the history of the conversation in all of the replies.
-CowboyNick
the tyranny of Instant Messaging?
At least for me it is.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
In my office, everyone relies on the phone. Imagine sitting in the cube between two people having a phone discussion, and hearing it in stereo.
The two objections to email listed in the article are:
1. It breaks your concentration.
2. It misleads you into inefficient problem solving.
I'll go with the second one, as you don't get any hands on experience, or any ad hoc give and take communication about the problems you are addressing. Meetings, phone calls, and face to face are really required for a lot of complex problems. (Many cut and dry tech questions can still be answered efficiently in email, however).
The first point-- that it "breaks your concentration-- to me is a matter of personal reaction to email. Are you compulsively checking it? Do you have audio and visual cues blasting you when something hits your inbox?
I check my email at work frequently, but between phone calls and meetings and moments of work where I need to concentrate. And I certainly don't have the mailbox yelling at me or popping up reminders. My clients, coworkers, et al all get their answers in a timely fashion, just not instantaneously at all times.
IM, on the other hand, is a different story. We're now using Lotus SameTime, and I find myself using the "I am Away" option quite frequently. Maybe the thrust of the article should have been IM and its annoyances?
At first, I was a bit sceptical about the contents of this article. I like e-mail and prefer it over phone conversations, especially because of its asynchronous nature but after having read the article, I must say that he is spot on.
Turning off my e-mail client and taking advantage of the asynchronous nature of e-mail even more would probably boost my productivity a lot. Not being a programmer, I still recognize that in order to get something done one must really sit down uninterrupted to get _real_ work done. And having pointless e-mails popping up every once in a while _is_ needless interruptions.
Not exactly rocket science but once in a while one should make sure that technology is working for oneself and not (too much) the other way around.
--
If it's not in an email it never happened. Even when I have a conversation, I feel obliged to follow up with an email summarising the points to make sure we're all on the same page (excuse the management speak).
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I am required to answer people as soon as the email comes in. It is expected, that I stop programming and answer my email ASAP, in case the problem being reported is an emergency.
And, being salaried, i don't get paid to work late nights and such (which doesn't stop me, but doesn't motivate me either).
Also, head phones aren't allowed in my office, because if a user comes in with a question it can make them feel ignored.
So. great advise. Wish i could use. it.
But the worst challenge is administration - This is an actual memo from our company president
... "yes I understandâ¦â but their expression shows confusion, and the supervisor knows the training is not complete.
Memo
To: CEO's
From: Jim
Date: 9/25/2002
Re: A Memo about Memo's
At the risk of sounding like a Delbert cartoon:
Yes, this is a Memo about the use of Memo's.
There have been several instances lately of inadequate communication, where the use of a Memo may have improved the understanding, or even prevented a problem.
First, I want to emphasize that the best form of communication is face-to-face; the second best is via telephone. Both of those methods allow the free flow exchange of ideas, with immediate feedback. The face-to-face advantage is the "body language" that most people can't hide, even if they tried. An example is a supervisor instructing a subordinate, who says:
Email is becoming another popular form of communication; it has its advantages, and its shortfalls. An email documents, as succinctly as the author can write it, just what is intended, no more, no less, and complete with a date and time. But a series of emails is not as efficient as a conversation.
Now to the heart of my message: many times, a conversation should be followed up by a Memo. It serves to record whatever was agreed upon, and can be copied to all appropriate individuals, without losing anything ''in translation". Memo's can be sent via email, fax, or courier. They may generate related Memo's in response, which can serve to document progress.
When using emails for this purpose, it is often best to string them together, so that all related emails or attached Memo's, can be referenced. If you are worried that an email may get automatically deleted or archived before the issue is resolved, it is wise to save it to a folder, or even print it if necessary.
It is generally advisable to specify responsibilities and expectations of respective individuals in your Memo's, including deadlines. Sometimes, you may wish to copy the Memo to a supervisor and/or senior management, so they can be apprised of the issue at hand.
Let's review:
1) While they don't replace conversations, Memo's are used to summarize understandings
2) Send to those directly involved, copy to others when appropriate, and list the author (you)
3) Date and title the Memo
4) Summarize understandings or instructions, complete with assignments and deadlines
5) Suggest additional meetings or conversations if more clarification is needed Note: 2-3 above are prompted for when using email or the Memo format in Word. We can help explain how we can use Outlook to organize Tasks and schedule meetings.
Example: please provide a copy of THIS Memo to each of your supervisors, and ask them to adopt this form of communication, this week. Thank you.
> If you leave your email client running, it means anyone anytime can
> interrupt what you're doing. Essentially they pick the moments at
> which you pay attention.
As opposed to a face-to-face conversation, where you blankly stare through someone or choose to ignore them? Or a phone call is supposed to be better in some way. "Ah, yes! You can ignore a phone call!" Yes, and you can ignore your email for periods as it stacks in.
I think having emails stream in on a regular basis is only a problem if you're obsessive compulsive about reading each and every one as they happen. Otherwise, it really isn't a problem anywhere near the author suggests. We can leave our email client running AND pick the moments we receive our mail.
I think one of the main reasons I like email is for a reason you give... it is a public and pemanent record. Although not necessarily true, I have to say, I like emails so that I can document things and refer back to them later when I need to. Super handy.
I'm sure I'd find more to disagree with in the article if it ever finishes loading.
For my money, the best way to deal with coworkers, particularly in reference to a technical problem, is email. You can take your time and frame your thoughts, organize them, edit them... Include source code and links to citations... It's really much better than face-to-face conversation. It even gives you an audit trail, in case someone "forgets" that he promised you a deliverable ("Oh? You never said you would write that component? Hmm... let me see" -- fishing in list of printouts -- "Huh. Isn't this your email describing what you were going to do for me?"). Face to face contact is a dodge, a way for people to stay off the record. Fuck 'em; always get it on "paper".
Besides, I'm not exactly a friendly person. Other people are fine in concept, provided I am permitted to observe them from a distance, but I don't like having too much face-to-face contact with them. Email lets me maintain some degree of solitude at work, which preserves my overall level of happiness.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I can't read the article (Slashdotted), but from the other posts here, it seems the article has it backwards.
I find that, for whatever reason, a lot of people can't seem to do anything via e-mail and insist on having unproductive meetings and conference calls. There's nothing more more annoying than listening to people go off on a tangent during a conference call, knowing that the real topic of the meeting will remain unresolved. Surely this nonsense could have been handled through e-mail.
Or worse, you take the trouble to hash out the basic issues by e-mail, and then meet to resolve a few tricky things in person - generally this is my preferred approach - but somebody didn't bother to read the e-mail discussion and insists on going over things that were already discussed and taken care of. The whole meeting is wasted as you go over some stupid little point that really doesn't matter anyway, and the real issues never make it to discussion. Grr.
[Posting anonymously in case the people I'm talking about read Slashdot. :-)]
If I had points, I'd give all of them to you. These are the same type of people who place text from your e-mails in BOLD in a "gotcha" kind of move.
I find the article itself to be mostly annoying. Anyone who allows their work to be degraded as a result of email has a performance problem, and blaming email, meetings, phone conversations, etc, for that performance problem is just avoiding the real problem.
Having said that, I'm going to vent about a wildly annoying email situation that I run into frequently.
I write a lot of proposals and plan deployment projects. I usually have technical questions regarding some specific aspects of deployments that I work on. I've found that I often have many questions, most of which are fairly verbose, and that won't be answered with one-word answers.
Normally, I bundle all these questions up in an email, put a summary at the beginning and a nice synopsis at the end, and send it off. About 50% of the time I get a good response back with verbose answers (usually these things are going to pre-sales technical support at software and hardware manufacturers), but about the other 50% of the time I get:
This is too technical to discuss in email, please call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
PLEASE CALL ME?!? WTF? This is too technical? Perhaps they should answer more like: "I am far, far too stupid to respond to this in writing. My writing skills suck, and I don't communicate well but can at least manage to pull it off in a verbal conversation. Please call." Or maybe, "We are dishonest and will be lying to you about our product. We don't want you to have our lies documented. Please call." And then there's also: "I look busier to my boss when I talk on the phone. If I just send you an email, I won't look busy. Please call." Yeesh.
There appears to be a strong lack of appreciation for the benefits of email, including the "read and respond" anytime nature, the clarity of good writing (especially on technical topics), the historical reference value, and the easy searchability and recall. Somehow these fucking idiots labor under the assumption that a verbal conversation with them is going to somehow be of more use to me than a documented, searchable, archivable email message. They also labor under the assumption that talking to their fucking voicemail or playing phone-tag with them is something that I want to and have time to do.
Frankly, this article looks like the musings of somebody with poor time management skills and who is looking for something/someone to blame for it.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
Who convinced this guy that "Memo's" is the plural form of "memo"?
The Dreaded BCC.
I've received E-mails which, on the surface, was sent just to me, only to have been BBC'd to my superiors. This is especially frustrating/embarassing when E-mail which I replied to is quoted and sent to and individual, who then reply to me with BBCs, so that my previous conversation goes out to parts unknown and is privied to who knows what, and I may have no clue who else is 'listening in'.
I consider the use of BCCs to be sneaky and cowardly, but also as a part of the office culture, so yeah, those E_mails have a life unto their own that you might not know.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
You want to increase office productivity?
It's really easy: Position everyone from CEO in his corner office through cube dweller to mail clerk on his mailbench so that their computer monitors -- what they are currently "working on" -- is viewable by anyone walking casually nearby. Give 'em all big 25" monitors as well.
Anticipated increase: 35%
At the end of each month, have IT run and post a report with every employee's name and the amount of time he spent parked on what particular web sites.
Anticipated Increase: 60%
E-mail, schmee-mail. You want to increase productivity, you restrict web access. Many, many office workers today do not even NEED Web access of ANY kind while on the job. Give these guys an e-mail reading client with word processor capabilitiy. Add a spreadsheet for the Accountants.
Anticipated Increase: 75%
Happy to Help!
It's really insulting to me and my team, because the implication is "Tricia has to be nudged to make this happen."
I sent an email saying specifically "I don't need to be cc:'d on every email about the project. If there is a problem with the project, I'm sure Tricia will tell me about it. If you feel that something is not being done to your satisfaction, please let me know directly and I'll take care of the situation."
I haven't had a CYA cc: since.
Gives people time to get back to you when they are able to, not when they have to. Allows time for an idea to be digested. At times making responses to ideas more favorable instead of needing a forced reply instantly over the phone or across the desk.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Yes, they are unproductive but e-mails are also a far less effective method of communicating. Don't get me wrong, I love e-mail for what it can do, however e-mails are by nature very ignorable as illustrated in the article.
I have been lately searching for a job... at first online exclusively via sites like monster.com & craigslist.org-- I sent and sent and sent and resumes and letters, only didn't get any replies for months. Eventually I got discouraged and decided to try one of those job fairs, though I thought I was being blown off (thanks, nothing at this time we'll call you if anything...) I got immediate results.
I think I can attribute this to several things inherent with e-mail:
1) Effort
Sending out an e-mail can take very little time or commitment, so deleting one follows suit. Spam has trained us well.
2) Quantity
Any online correspondence of this nature will attract many more applicants than other methods. While this seems good for employers, it devalues each application further. Not absolutely perfect experience? *delete* This method is unfortunate because often there is a lot more to being able to fit into a working environment than prior history. Sure you know your field, but what good is an employee that's so annoying they can't work in teams with co-workers? That's the sort of thing you can only discern in person.
3) the Human Element
When you meet someone face to face there is a lot more sway in the interaction, you give a real physical person more respect and empathy than you do a page of text. Just look at some of the troll posts you are all familiar with for proof of this phenomenon. I highly doubt Anonymous Cowards ever insult or smack people down IRL as I have seen them do on message boards.
4) the Squeaky Wheel
When you have the benefits of #3 you have a lot more slack given to you, and it is much easier to retain a presence when you correspond via phone or in person simply because you cannot be ignored until convenient.
Many /. readers may not remember the days before email in the workplace (heck, many /. readers may not yet be in the workplace).
Did everyone have face to face conversations, relationships were built, understanding blossomed, conflicts avoided, before email came along and sentenced us to digital solitary confinement?
No.
People wrote memos. Know what "cc" means on the email you send? Carbon Copy, from the old typewriter and carbon paper days. Memos were typed by secretaries (who inevitably had stained hands from the carbon paper), and sent via interoffice mail to the recipient, or slipped onto chairs or under doors late at night if particularly conflict laden.
Discussions were drawn out over weeks instead of hours, with each memo salvo taking a day or two.
Email doesn't allow us to avoid our co-workers - trust me, that that invented long before digital anything. It just gives us a lower environmental impact way of doing it.
Does email provide us with interruption time shifting, as the article suggests? Yes, but so does going through one's paper "in-bin".
Nothing new, just faster, more efficient, lower cost, lower impact time wasting.
It creates a paper trail so we can later go back and follow the thought processes that led to either the award winning design that saved the world, or the "oops" that irradiated Canada.
--- Ban humanity.
One aspect of that article that I definitely disagree with is the contention that technical debates cannot occur over email (or similarly via corporate or group newsgroups). While I will absolutely agree that technical debates can get very heated, and many egos have been bruised, I would take an email debate on technology over a "let's meet about it" any day of the week. Why? In email conversation it is the facts that do the talking: Anyone has the ability, and indeed the responsibility, to research the positions taken at their leisure, and interject if they find fault, as ultimately the truth and correct course of action is the paramount concern. In a meeting, on the other hand, it is sales skills that win the day: Extroverts with overwhelming self-confidence invariably convince the crowd, while the technically proficient, who generally are more aware of the limits of their knowledge and hence don't exude the sludge of unfounded-confidence, stay quiet. I've witnessed this happen quite a few times, and it leads to short term buy-in that just leads to non-resolution after non-resolution.
An adversity to email debates on technical merits is often based in all the wrong reasons: Giving "equal voice" to the technically less capable. Protecting ignorance. Protecting unfounded pride.
"When writing an email which has a wide distribution, or which affects a negotiation, or possible deal, or potential sale, take the time to write a draft, and reread it later. You can almost always improve the wording, make a point more concisely, or other otherwise improve the communication.
;-)
Is it me, or should he have reread his article before publishing it
This creates the same sort of problem the author describes where incoming email interrupts work flow. I think the solution here is the same: Don't answer the phone. I keep my email client up all the time but that doesn't mean I have an obligation to jump over and answer an email whenever it arrives. I tab over to the email client every once in a while to see if something has arrived. The same applies to the phone. If I'm in the middle of something the ring becomes a request for my attention, not a demand.
I don't see a point to this article at all. Leaving my email client open lets people decide when they want to talk to me? Huh?
Turn your email client off? Are you kidding? Doesn't this guy realize that not all of us can use mutt or kmail or whatever at work, we're forced to use Outlook, which takes eons to startup, and even longer - oddly enough - to shut off (a feat only MS programmers could accomplish I think).
Nothing, I mean nothing breaks one's concentration like a fucking constantly ringing telephone, and having to log into voice mail and constantly check the messages that were left while you were talking on the phone. Or what about when you're trying to talk to someone about something important, but they're on the goddamn phone yapping and won't get off, because it lets them feel superior to you to make you wait to talk, and the phone is always more important than a face to face conversation. Telephones are the problem, I would gladly work without them at all.
You need to distinguish the word style used to refer specifically to syntactic structures, and style used to refer to a more real-world sense of "how I go about programming". I don't think his presumption that everyone works most effectively in his manner is valid. For example, I don't have to turn my email off to be able to concentrate. And I never, to my knowledge, have had to have 3 hour stretches to do what little programming I do, since those projects are all side projects. I still accomplish things with my programming. Oh, wait, I guess he just meant head-down coders. Too bad that's not the only kind (or "style") of programming that occurs, eh?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The interruptions are the problem. Whether these are phone calls or E-mail-notifications or people visiting.
Or when people call on the phone because they want to know if I have received their E-mails...
The problem seems to be that a lot of people think E-mails are something that is always to be replied to immediately, as if they were phone calls. I do not know why this is; ordinary paper-mail is certainly asynchronous, and any kind of written letter (paper or electronic) requires about the same amount of thought anyways.
Time and time again, I tell them: I will read the E-mail and answer it when it is convenient to do so. Most of the time this seems to be grudgingly accepted; the exceptions are when the mail is about some bad system bug that demands immediate attention. And some people never seem to be able to understand why they have to wait more than 10 minutes for a reply. Must be their jobs that have all this urgency; well, I've got deadlines as well so we will have to live with it! Besides, I have to think of an answer.
Otherwise, while in bug-fixing mode, phone, E-mails, and face-to-face meetings have all their good and bad points. Phone conversations are great for getting error information from the user, most of them can read off a dialog box, and I can tell them to click this and that and immediate evaluate responses. When it comes to correcting them by having to edit some configuration data however, phone is terrible. Imagine trying to dictate URLs or code full of important punctuation-marks and hope to get it right ...
And here is exactly where E-mail excels. I can type up the correct texts in the mail itself or in an attached file, and tell the recipients exactly where to put them for things to start working again. But doing the active troubleshooting (in the style of "try this ... hmm ... try that ... nope, how about you do this and then try ... ah! it crashed. OK can you read me the stack-trace... ") over E-mail is slow and cumbersome.
E-mail also has the great advantage of persisting after the fact. I do not intend to, nor manage, to remember every little detail talked about on the phone, neither do the people at the other end of the line. Instead, when an E-mail from last month is lying around, this makes it easier to pick up the thread where we left it.
Face-to-face meetings are most useful when evaluating features, testing, or simply for "showing the flag" to the customers. Makes them feel appreciated, and we all know what an asset satisfied customers are.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
More importantly. Emails prove that you said what you said. On the phone there is no record and it's just you against the other guy and if the other guy is the boss or more senior then you usually lose. With an email in their face they don't stand a chance.
I have successfully defended many a project decision by pulling out a critical email.
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, but, often, meeting dynamics start to encroach on such email exchanges, and the "Solve it now, we've wasted enough time!" rather than "solve it correctly" pressure this creates results in sub-optimal, short-term "solutions".
The "best" solution is the one that has the most support, in such situations, whether or not it is correct, robust, or scalable to future needs.
Of course, as we all know, the processor doesn't give a rat's ass how much support a "solution" has, but rather whether it is correct.
While email might be the perfect forum for long, complex, technical discussions, to solve difficult problems, with facts and avenues of research carefully preserved, articles like this one, and the "don't waste time on email" mentality they will engender in management as "the latest productivity thing", will derail such use of the medium. So, we are, once again, diverted to the "five minute fix" hell, that so makes meetings unproductive: if you can't make the quick fix work, you must be a bad programmer, no?
So, while I agree that email is an ideal medium for dealing with difficult problems, trying to use it for that purpose is likely going to invite sabbotage from those who do not understand the nuances of the problem, and what makes it difficult in the first place, as they get drawn into the discussion. This is espescially true as the design and programming vocabulary grows to accomodate maturation of the discipline: words like "generic", "refactor", "polymorphic", "singleton", "abstract", and "virtual" have very specific meanings in a modern design and OO programming context, and are ripe for misinterpretation by those who take them out of context: I've seen "generic" mistaken for "portable", "virtual" as pertaining to memory management (which it may or may not), and "abstract" misconstrued as "academic", with "polymorhic" and "refactor" raising fear of "too complicated" solutions.
There are simple problems and complex problems. And, complex problems do not have simple solutions, by definition. A growing trend in these days of "interchangable software engineers" is pressure to code to the level of understanding of the "least skilled programmer" to support this interchangability. The dynamics of large groups (and growing email audiences) increases these pressures. Sorry, but there is nothing that can make brain surgery a "cut by numbers" discipline, and there is nothing that can make complex problems simple.
So, while email may be perfect to let "hard core" problem-solvers collaborate, their efforts will be usurped, making it best to avoid the medium in favour of the classic midnight-programming sessions, when the hoi poloi have left to pursure their domestic lives, no doubt comfortably simple.
You could've hired me.
Personally, I strongly perfer email to the phone. Why?
You can check your email when you're done with what you're in the middle of.
You don't have to respond right away, you can find the correct and complete answer.
Reduced accent errors. Ever work in a place with people from India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Germany, England, US, Vietnam, and the Phillipines? Sometimes it's hard to tell what everyone is saying even though it's all in English.
It keeps a record. You don't need to remember exactly what the guy said, it's written down! Very handy for part numbers.
You know who you're dealing with. "Hey, this is Mike..." on the phone is replaced with something like "Mike Smith -mike.smith@company.com-". You're not dealing with Mike Jones.
Long, technical matters can be spelled out in detail. If a procedure on how to do something can be spelled out in words, it's more likely to be followed without errors than if it's orally passed over a half hour phone conversation.
Cool down period. If you're getting upset and starting to argue, you can pause, cool down, and take care of it with a cool head isntead of ending up in a verbal flamefest.
---
If you want something that breaks your concentration, it's not email, it's the phone and PA systems.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I will send 10 emails a day to the person in the cube right next to me. I just don't like to talk to the guy in person or the phone...He annoys me and he is lazy. Yet because we share certain physical resources (programmers) I have to keep a line of communication open. I only tend to verbally communicate with people I can stand. For as much as I HATE email in gerneral, this is one good thing about it.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Whether I answer the phone or not, the ringing breaks my concentration far worse than any quick pop-up & ding from my email ever could!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I've been at my company over ten years, and had the same email account for about seven. No matter how many filters I put in, I get *shitloads* of spam every day. (Changing my email addy would be a nightmare because I get so many legit mails a day as well.) If I responded to emails immediately, as everyone else in the company has apparently been trained to, I would *never* get any work done. And since I'm in charge of my section, this could be a slight productivity problem. :)
You must think in Russian.