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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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I have to agree with you - I'd guess that it takes a pretty inexperienced user to have their mail program interrupt them every time a message arrives.
I leave mine running, and just check it when I feel like it.
eMail communication at work offers one significant advantage over the other methods described - a dated, written record of your conversation.
When you work in a corporate culture where comments are often blown out of proportion, and where your coworkers are out to screw you every chance they can get, you need a written record of every conversation. You need to document every engagement with the customers and with management for the inevitable misunderstandings and escalation and trials that come up.
Non-trackable official work conversations are scary and a really bad idea.
All changes to software I am developing are sent to me via email. Providing they are concise enough, it means I've always got something in writing to prove what was originally requested.
When people give you verbal instructions, I find that when they forget to ask you to do something, they often try to turn it around and make out that they *did* tell you.
People should use email because it's an efficient tool but I guess I use it mainly to cover my own back.
This is the most annoying aspect of email in the workplace. CC'ing somebody's f***** boss as if the recipient is going to think "Ah, he's CC'd my boss, i'd better get a move on with this."
All it does is PISS THEIR BOSS OFF.
And that's only the start of the problem. I have just been involved in a project where a minor issue that could have been resolved between two developers was blown up out of all proportion and resulted in a "crisis meeting" - all because of a reckless CC.
Where I work, the guy in the office next to me (about 10 feet away) would be the 'primary support' contact. Every once in awhile he'd get a bug report or something that would need to go to me. He'd email it to me. I dont check my email every 30 seconds, so it would basically go unnoticed for hours, maybe even a day or so. If he'd even speak in a normal voice and say "hey, check your email", then I'd know.
He's been since shit-canned, but it was still endlessly annoying to find out about a problem later than it was reported.
However, with our clients, email is the only way I want to handle everything. It provides a written audit trail of everything that happens, and it's come in handy many times.
One client in particular is becoming infamous around here for talking to techies like me on the phone, saying "oh there's nothing wrong, everything is going fine, just a couple really minor issues", and as soon as the phone is hung up, she's talking to the tech director pulling a chicken little act and telling him that the sky is falling and us lazy computer nerds arent saving the day. Luckily he's not enough of a pointy-haired boss to realize she's full of shit.
So, when she calls, I say "put every issue you have in an email". She has no room to lie and tell the boss she reported problem X or Y.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Ah a first oportunity to try out the Distributed Mirror Project
Here is a mirror list
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
[reads] This isn't so much about email interruptus, as about a particular personality type's inability to task-switch efficiently. IOW, the classic ADD model, coupled with the obsessive/compulsive's *need* to attend to anything they've set as part of their routine. Which are both common personality types in the coding world.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And when you're working in IT, where your manager is probably on the verge of a nervous breakdown half the day, email is a lifesaver. I know that my boss preferred getting emails to having people walk into his office for everything. Sure, urgent matters are a different issue. But at least he could reply to important emails quickly and the rest of the email after the working day was done and not be interrupted in the middle of whatever he was doing earlier.
But, there's also laziness. I can't think of how many times my college roommates and I used to IM each other when we were all within shouting distance of each other.
I received typically 400 e-mails PER DAY. Avoid face contact? I actually have to go out of my way to get F2F contact! And yet at home we have more than one computer per household memeber, and I still tell my wife to e-mail me -- from the other side of the room!!! E-mail is a medium all to itself. As far as for solving problems, it depends. Complex problems, I'll have to agree, do better in meeting rooms and around coolers -- where there is a high person-to-person exchange. Low bandwidth p2p exchanges are better suited for e-mail. E-mail does give you the big advantage of automatically having a written record of the conversation. That could also be a problem, too, since such records can be subpeonaed! I wish everyone would use encryption with their e-mails. That way, you can simply "forget" the pw if someone wants to dig in...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Use to drive me nuts, especially since we were in the middle of tracking down hot bugs. It broke MY concentration, but apparently he enjoyed it.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
The article fails to address one important question IMO.
The fact is that for some people, being contactable is absolutely essensial throughout the working day. Personally, I find myself constantly being asked technical questions about a very wide range of subjects as well as having my own work to do. I have to have give answers at some point or others get no work done. If people want to know how to contact me, I have to tell them something!
By default the majority just pick up the phone and call me. This is an absolute disaster when I am in the middle of debugging some complex problem.
Most of the time now when someone phones with a technical question I ask them if they can send me an email about it. After hearing this several times they usually get the message and stop calling at all in favour of sending emails. This has improved my ability to work no end. I now check and answer emails in batches whenever I have a convenient breaking point.
Email has substantially reduced breaks in my concentration. Exactly the opposite of what the author finds.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Sounds like the author needs to brush off his copy of Peopleware. Wearing headphones in a cubicle blocks out the interruptions, but doesn't make you a more effective worker.
The test: two groups of programmers are given a convoluted mathematical problem and are tasked to write a program that solves it. One group works in silence. The other gets tunes to listen to.
The trick: the problem is actually an identity function; the output is just the input.
The results:Nearly everyone wrote a working program. But more people in the silence group discovered it was an identity function and came threw with a one-liner.
Conclusion? Apparently some part of your brain is active when you've got background music on, and is otherwise unavailable for those creative insights, bouts of genius, or other epiphanies. If you work in a cube, it's time to revolt!
IMHO, e-mail is a great way to communicate information
- when no immediate response (if any) is required
- when you need to give multiple people the same information
- to keep a record/reminder of the information (such as when warning about an impending event, like scheduled downtime, etc.)
Unfortunately, in my experience, people rarely consider which is the best way to communicate. As a result, the wrong medium often is used.Case in point: people where I work have not developed good communication patterns. A lot of information is passed face-to-face, one person at a time. As a result,
- I frequently am interrupted while trying to program to be told something that is not urgent and requires no response or action on my part
- different people get told different things, so rarely do people have the same information, and no one knows what the other people know
- often, some people never get the information at all
- a lot more time is wasted dealing with the consequences when a 1-minute e-mail could have saved a lot of bother
- when I do send e-mail to my colleagues, it often is filtered into a folder and ignored/forgotten; often this results in me having to have a F2F conversation with someone to repeat the information anyway
Similarly, in other places I've worked, meetings were wasted passing on information that could have been better served with e-mail, while critical information that should have been discussed in meetings wasn't.Anyway, I think it just boils down to that old adage: the right tool for the job.
I talk to people using Gaim (on Jabber or MSN protocol) whenever possible, and hav full logging turned on. It makes for a more active conversation that e-mail - i.e. more productive, and it's still easy to copy & paste. Having a jabber server set up in the office keeps conversation secure too, instead of going via some server on the internet.
:-)
E-mail is better for when you want to explain something in detail to someone or send them a document. Even then, I think it's better to put the document somewhere they have access to it and tell them where to get it. E-mail was designed for plain text and should remain that way
Follow me
I agree fully. The telephone is much more of an interruption of concentration than email, by far -- but if my mail client were beeping or jangling at me whenever new mail comes in, I might see it the other way.
#ifdef NERD_METAPHORS
I do both coding and technical support in the course of my work. If I am in the middle of writing a piece of code and the phone rings, I have to do a mental stack backtrace to get out of "Python mode" and into "speaking English to humans mode". This leaves the large amount of program state I was holding in my head in a shambles that I have to completely reconstruct before I can get back to coding.
However, if I receive an email, I will check it once I have reached some kind of pausing point in the code -- finish writing a function or module, or get the comments of what the current block is going to do sketched out. The user gets almost as fast of service (since I write small functions) and I get more code written. So email works much better in the course of my dual coding/support job than the phone does.
#endif /* NERD_METAPHORS */
However, I know people who use Eudora and have it set to full-on noisy mode, with the pop-up dialog box and the loud doo-DOO-doo! sound effect whenever new mail comes in. Gah. I could never work that way.
Our office uses Lotus, and has a policy where it autodeletes e-mails after 60 days. So history didn't start until 60 days ago!
Towards the Singularity.
Great Points!
Email is not only a great way to archive and reference issues, writing itself forces one to think out wtf is actually being said.
Too often I've been on the `phone with sales/mgt types who need to "talk through" some point that could be communicated in a few succint lines.
First, the article does not object to e-mail merely the way a lot of people use it. Second, you and the article writer are in complete agreement about point 1. The fact is that most people configure their e-mail clients so that they know about every e-mail straight away. I learned not to do that years ago. Perhaps companies should configure their e-mail servers to only deliver mail in batches every two hours say.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
But I work at a datacentre for a major bank and they are extremely touchy about software and (network stability and all that) so we don't get IMs at all. This morning I solved that problem by 'coding' and instant messenger that included history tracking using nothing but batch files, built-in-windows executables, using the windows "NET SEND" command. It works quite nicely and already saved me a bunch of time today getting information.
So if you want the efficiency of IMs but none of the software, I suggest you use NET SEND. It caught on like today with a bunch of other people in my area.
(Please, spare the jokes about using windows on a network when stability is critical. They're only dumb terminals used to launch xterms to access the mighty solaris server.)