More on the problem with email

Jenny has declared email bankruptcy but is watching her debts pile up again. I have (with effort) followed the Inbox Zero route. John Cook thinks email isn’t the problem; on the other hand, he’s reacting to a chorus of people telling him that email is ruining their lives, and maybe they have some good reason for saying this. Cook’s commenter Heather appears to be staying barely above water with 200 messages in her inbox, while commenter Mr. Gunn recommends a technological solution.

From the comfort of my empty inbox, I thought of another big issue with email. Actually, a huge issue.

Email is a way to feel like you’re working without actually thinking very hard. Sort of like blogging, actually–but blogging at least has the side benefit of sharing information with the world, focusing one’s thoughts, etc. Actually, one of the unanticipated advantages of blogging, for me, was to organize the ideas that otherwise were going out into a million little emails.

I could–and have, often enough–put all of my work effort on some days into working with the inbox. What’s the problem with that? First, I’m letting others drive my priorities. Some of this is fine–I certainly don’t delude myself that I’m like that guy who sat in a room by himself and proved Fermat’s Last Theorem–but at some point I think a little more direction to my work is useful. Second, inbox-handling just isn’t usually the highest-quality thinking. It’s just hard enough to occupy my mind without actually pushing me. I might as well just be playing Tetris for two hours.

My plan with Inbox Zero is to spend less total time on my email. I will spend some of the released time on more interesting, useful work, and it will also free up time for leisure.

The next step is to cut back on blogging. (Things will improve once we get the Scheduled Posting feature working again, so I can just write 10 blog entries, schedule them, and not have to think about them anymore.)

10 thoughts on “More on the problem with email

  1. I have big problems with e-mails. I have more than two hundred e-mails for replying and this is not a good thing, I am sure about this. And my blog, poor blog. I have a lot of ideas, but I get home so tired from college.
    I used to check my inbox each five minutes, but now I use an IM that says me when I have a new message. It helps me a lot.

  2. The issue isn't the volume of email, or even if it's good work or not.

    Sometimes, email *is the job*, or a very key part of it.

    The issue (like telephone calls and people stopping by one's office) – is that all messages arrive more or less in the order sent, and generally without knowlege of what you need or want (unless of course you asked for something and someone emailed it to you.)

    Like postal mail, but unlike phone calls and personal visits, there's not much throttling. You almost certainly couldn't deal with as many visits or phone calls per day as you do emails – people would get busy signals, overflow your voice mail, run into lines of people outside your door.

    So just as people who do lots of meetings (think of your Dr.) have schemes to sort them out, filter out those that are unworthy, and try to impose some order, you must manage your email (and blog reading, web surfing, paper reading, and book reading) with some more or less similar scheme. (Filter, sort, allocate time, throttle the volume.) Not only filtering and sorting, but also throttling of response and deferal until allocated times will per force be required for this.

  3. I keep my inbox clean, meaning it can all be seen without scrolling on my laptop screen. If it gets bigger, I prune it. This visual reminder scheme is so intuitive I don't worry "must clean out emails." It also tends allows a few things to sit as easily visible reminders or as things to share, etc.

    I keep responses to emails brief. As in 5 or 10 words. Unless it's a "letter" to family and those are rare.

    I don't find email onerous at all. It allows me to respond to things when I want while IM breaks my chain of thought and activity.

  4. It is a fascinating topic! Someone should be writing a psychology dissertation and then specializing in problems related to digital media – it obviously taps in to all sorts of other stuff (I do not have a real-world hoarding problem, just an email one!), cutting across traditional specializations…

    (To clarify what my email bankruptcy locks me in on, I find myself in an insomnia-inducing state of constant and instant responsiveness, because if I leave anything in my inbox to deal with later I know I will not be able to find it again!)

    Here's to Inbox Zero…

  5. We need "coaches" to keep us at the top of our game continually pointing out our bad habits and strongly encouraging improvements – especially outside our core competencies…

    but most of us just have to make do with self-coaching usually taken up after being knocked down when we inadvertently dropped our guard.

    Keith
    p.s. Its amazing how many scientist types I encounter who have yet to figure out how to search their email boxes (and if they could look over my shoulder when I am doing something they know more about than I, I am sure they would be similarly amazed)

  6. I think I'm starting to get a handle on why most people's attitude toward email seems so foreign to me. I think my email patterns may be different. Email is the way that I find out about the critical 'must be addressed immediately' issues in my job. That's probably because I've trained people not to call me on the phone and they know I have a Blackberry. I just don't understand people who think email is intrusive, but think nothing of the noisy interruptions of telephone calls. The thing I like about email is that it gives me something that Andrew thinks it takes away from him, more self-direction over my priorities. My job involves giving people answers. With email, I choose the order that those answers come in, without having to tell everybody "I'll get back to you".

    I did a quick analysis of my work email. I've received 55 emails this week (so far), not counting meeting requests etc.

    37 — emails were essentially informational emails. I could glance at them and safely ignore them (knowing that if I needed the information later, I could find it). I admit that it takes time and practice to get that ruthless with your email.

    2 — emails were reminders of loathsome, but required timekeeping tasks. These emails are the ones that I have trouble with. I generally do not act on them immediately, but have to deal with them at some point. One of those is the reminder for doing our project-based time accounting. I spoke with the person who sends these out and showed her how to send them with a flag (which pops up a reminder when they are due and turns them red when they are past due). This helps me and all the rest of the people forced to do this stay in compliance with our policies. Also, I showed her how to embed a link into the email that takes one directly to the web page where we enter our time. One of my important principles is to work with my email correspondents to make email work better for everyone. The second of these emails is from Corporate HR. They seem to make it as difficult as possible to follow through on the tasks they need. They send a reminder to do your timesheet before you can do it (because the time period for that timesheet has finished). Then, three days later, after you've missed their deadline, they send you another reminder. This is incredibly ineffective and yet, they have resisted any suggestions for changes. My compliance with their deadlines is very poor.

    5 — personal emails that I handled as needed.

    2 — work emails that included voting buttons that make responding take about 1 second.

    9 — emails that required substantive responses. I spent a substantial amount of time crafting responses to those emails (15 minutes to over an hour) because it is a huge part of my job. I usually try to avoid having more than one response going at a time, but occasionally I have to store one draft if a higher priority and more critical item pops up.

    For me, treating those 9 meaningful emails the same way as all the others would be absurd. Often I need to talk to other people, do some research, or just think about the issue being raised before I respond. Occasionally, I might get 9 of those emails in a single day. I don't see why I should stress out over that. Things are just going to queue up. If I have to put things off, I just make sure I flag them appropriately. The rigid 'handle every email when you read it' seems more stress-inducing to me than having the right tools for managing my work.

  7. Things you absolutely MUST know how to do with your email client:

    1) Create "search" folders that show you a fixed slice of your emails. This could be all emails in the last week, or all emails in the last month, or all emails from certain people in the last week, or all unread emails…. create some important windows on your email…

    2) Tag emails that need a response. This can help you filter.

    3) Set up your junk filters so they work well (usually setting the junk threshold lower is better, especially in Thunderbird)

    4) Know how to search, so you don't need to spend time filing.

    5) Learn how to let go. Some things just don't need to be responded to, let them expire out of your relevant "time window" search and ignore them.

    I think people get panicky because they have the feeling that there are a lot of things they're supposed to do but they're not really sure what they all are. A zero-message inbox is just a way of reassuring yourself that there's nothing there you're forgetting. But if your email is full of 3 year old unresponded emails… who cares… it's too late. Learn to expire your queue into an archive. You can even write automatic filters to do this if it's useful for you.

  8. One more thing to learn how to do: Create filters that automatically file things that you get frequently.

    eg: create a folder for email that comes from your blog software, and a filter that automatically sticks it into that folder.

    Create a folder for mailing lists like the R users mailing list, or other automatic lists, and a filter that sorts incoming email from those things into that folder.

    Get stuff from departmental administrators? auto-file them into their own folders.

    I never look at my inbox, only one of my "windows" that show me recent emails from certain folders. By the time my spam filter, and auto-filing are done, only recent things that are likely to be important, or easy to respond to are left in my "window".

  9. This is not a problem. People take email too seriously. If you can't get to an email the moment you see it, or are not able to read something for a few hours or days then the world will not end. Nothing will explode. Puppies will not die.

    I get upwards of 200 messages per day of real-live email. I have filters for much of it and over time this has reduced my Inbox, but that's beside the point. The point is…it just doesn't matter. If someone really needs you they will call, if not they can wait for you to get back to them on your own time as befits your own agenda.

    Incoming email is not a responsibility. It's not a curse. It just is.

  10. I think Aaron (above) has a very valid point. Email isn't THE essential component in day to day tasks relating to business/education.

    Its just a process that makes certain things easier. It won't die away, but may change/be adapted in the future. You can also be certain that technology will continue to evolve processes to continue to make life easier.

    Personally, I think that is a good thing.

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