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Why Email is a Bad Collaboration Tool
An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia follows up his popular "The Good in Email" article with "The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)":
"In spite of email's universal success (as a collaboration tool), and in spite of its many good traits, email contains deep, inherent flaws that force users and markets to seek alternatives to collaborating via email."
I believe the problem with Email is usually only 10% of what you are trying to communicate is actually understood.
:-)
Sort of like posting on slashdot.....
RTFG - Read The F#$%ing Google!
Which, in the end, is one of the problems; the Sender sets the importance, not the Reader.
IMHO a simple improvement to email would be no more than twice a day delivery. People would know the corporate email shows up at 6:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Therefore, if that time has passed, you won't get a reply before the next email dump. This removes the pressure on the recipient, who knows he has at least 8 hours before anything has to be done with that email.
A side benefit is that there is only new email twice a day; when you arrive, and mid-afternoon. No more checking it every five minutes, no more boss yelling "did you get my email yet", no little dings/mailbox flags, etc, going off and distracting you from your job. Go a step farther, and let an intelligent agent apply your rules of priority to the message "has the word "superbowl video", so file it under "never"", rather than the sender's, and some of the issues are gone.
For colllabortion between more than 2-3 people, use a Wiki or Notes. Email should be for person-person, ephemeral, communication.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I've just disabled the "priority" column in Outlook, as all it tells me is that the email is from a certain person (who shall not be named) who seems to think that everything is urgent.
The disease I'd like to complain about today is the "read receipt". I can only imagine how much time people waste looking up whether I've read their message or not. You can turn that off, too, but some people really go crazy if they don't get their read receipts.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
In development over the last 5 years I think the most useful tools are IM (or IRC) and Wiki. Email can be used to setup a time to meet/work on things, from there constant talk back/forth via IM is perfect. Hashing out overall ideas via the Wiki is perfect for before and after, and allows for ones ideas to get fully out there, then edited by others during critque.
This has been true for me working on OSS at night with a partner in Qubec as well as working in the same office with a developer two aisles away.
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