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Messengers of Productivity

Posted 31-Jul-2008 by Robby Slaughter (@robbyslaughter)

Teamwork dates back to prehistoric times, when men hunted mammoths in packs and women raised children in communities. Modern organizations pursue different goals and utilize more complex tools, but still demonstrate that people working together can achieve more. Collaboration has potential but still takes real work. That's why it's tough to correctly use email.

It's Not Done Until You Say It Is

In many projects, completion of a task is self-evident. You know the neighborhood kid deserves his spending money because the lawn is visibly mowed. But often, the people involved in an organization, an academic course, a non-profit board, or a business unit cannot confirm success by inspection. If you promise to call the plumber, and I'm not in the room while you're having the conversation on the phone, I do not know if it's been done. This is not a question of trust or reliability but of confirmation. If a task must be completed, all affected parties must be informed after the task is complete.

This is the most important and useful function of email: to provide an unequivocal, written record of the finality of work. We are so often coordinating efforts with coworkers, family members, friends, or fellow volunteers across different hours and disparate geographies that we have no way of knowing what others have actually done unless they personally tell us. If you tell me to mail the bank a check, a part of you will spend the next week wondering if I've actually found the time to do it. I can save you the concern (and demonstrate responsibility) with a confirmation email. Now, everyone knows the work is done.

The Situation Comedy

If indicating completion is the foremost purpose of email, than a close second is to provide status. Sometimes, tasks are held up by mitigating circumstances or simply take a great deal of time to complete. After a day or two, you know the requestor is wondering if you've started or whether you even got the message in the first place. No news is not good news—it's just no news!

An email stating that "I got your request" has been shown to significantly reduce blood pressure, especially when followed with a promised response timeframe. A quick organizational tip is to copy yourself on your status update message. This keeps the task near the top of your own inbox, and ensures that you know when you last replied.

Decide but Avoid Discussion

Email is a fantastic medium for picking the next girls' night out restaurant from a list but terrible for a detailed conversation on geopolitics. If you are posing a question to one or more recipients, make the range of options as simple as possible. For example, it's better to suggest a handful of dates for a proposed meeting then to ask everyone when they are available. Email is short and precise, so open-ended queries are usually ineffective.

If you're on the receiving end of a question, the most important action you can take is to actually answer. If you're uncertain about the church council's request for feedback on a new construction project, the worst choice you can make is to remain silent. If you don't give an opinion, the pollster will assume you are indifferent, when in reality you just feel uninformed. Explain you're not ready to decide. Email makes it easy to avoid false choices.

Email seems like the perfect system for intense debates between enlightened, diametrically opposed perspectives. You have time to craft arguments, you can quote your opponent mercilessly with a quick cut-and-paste, and the ultimate repository of discourse and crackpot theories—the Internet—is just keystrokes away. Unfortunately, this way lies madness. Email lasts forever and some clever phrase you penned just to prove a point will haunt you well into the next decade. Your computer has no buttons for nuance and sarcasm, so where you intend to inform you will sometimes offend. Never talk about anything complicated or controversial over email. Those conversations must happen in person.

The Overwhelming Majority

Although ideally, email should be used for confirmation and status updates and simple decisions, we all know that by quantity almost every email is some kind of announcement. Even discounting spam (the most unwelcome of announcements), most email is newsletters, company memos, promotional materials, comedic forwards, or general solicitations. This is email that neither warrants nor expects a direct response, at least not one produced with the “reply”� button. The salient design features of electronic messaging—fast delivery, informality, minimal complexity and device independence—are a poor match for glossy advertisements and official notices. When considered along with technical limitations, all email newsletters are hard. If you have to announce something by email, it should either be a statement of what has already happened (a meeting summary, a status update, or a completion report) or an assertion of what will happen (a forthcoming meeting or project). Never use email for anything indefinite or speculative. It's too useful a medium to corrupt with anything that might be untrue or that people might not care to hear.

More Short Emails

The best use of electronic mail is messages that mark completion, provide status, give specific directions, or summarize events. These emails usually fit within a few lines and thus are highly efficient. Furthermore, many long emails contain multiple separate ideas, directives and updates, and would be more effective if rewritten as several short messages. One topic per message transforms the network of email into a sort of distributed to-do list, with everyone free to focus on actual work instead of their towering inbox. In fact, anyone who uses email effectively will keep better schedules and streamline the interchange of assignments, because the essentials of task delegation, project status, and group decisions can happen through the anytime-you-get-to-it nature of email.

Most people treat email more like a 21st century burden than a time-saving invention. Inbox-battling is fire-fighting, with every blaze a potential day-killer. Used appropriately, however, email is a tool worthy of our hunter-gatherer legacy. The messages travel faster and with greater clarity than shouts across the meadow, but brevity and confirmation are still critical. In any medium, asking "Did you make plans for dinner?" must inspire an informative reply. Choosing not to answer may affect more than your supper.

Further Reading:

• Four Hour Work Week on Email Time Management
• Email Management at Microsoft
• Washington Times discusses 'Bit Literacy'

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