Don’t E-Mail It!

By Daniel J. Pritchett on September 22nd, 2008

This week I’m going to talk about a few opportunities for improving workplace efficiency through better communication. One of the biggest drivers behind this blog is a search for efficiency in the workplace. Too often we find ourselves performing the same tasks again and again without ever stopping to analyze our actions. Some of my most cherished successes at work have been creative automations inspired by a desire to avoid repeating a mundane task every quarter for the next five years.

One-off messages lose value over time
Traditional workplace discussion options like email or written memos tend to be context-free and one-way communications. Messages sent with these media can be meaningless if revisited a few months later. Your e-mail chain with a coworker in another country benefits you greatly today, but it won’t be around later to benefit teammates who didn’t see it or hear about it. The people who support or replace you in a few years won’t be able to extract any value from that conversation either.

Collaborate in public
Today there are big opportunities for you to streamline the communications of everyone in your organization. Take advantage of forums, blogs, wikis and any other publicly viewable and searchable tools you can find. When your notes and work are all public, the ground you’ve covered might not have to be revisited by anyone else for a while. Contributors can accomplish more by building on your existing body of work than by duplicating it.

Check back later this week for some in-depth ideas on how to improve the value of your work. We’ll look at attaching persistent discussions to static pages, re-purposing email as an alert system rather than a conversation medium, and the critical importance of simplifying your communications.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: communication, efficiency, email, persistence, strategy
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September 22, 2008 at 3:37 pm Daniel J. Pritchett

More and more I find that e-mails at work are just wasted effort. I'm moving towards persistent communications like threaded discussions or public wikis. I still use email a bunch, but it's mostly just for getting immediate alerts on updates to other services.
September 22, 2008 at 3:46 pm anna

there's almost this expectation of immediate gratification, and so someone writes an email, then chats me, walks by the cube, and SMS's me while I am responding to the email.
September 22, 2008 at 3:47 pm Shawn Farner

I think a lot of people send the email for the CYA factor - cover your ass.
September 22, 2008 at 4:03 pm Daniel J. Pritchett

@Shawn: My office deletes emails every so often for sox/liability reasons. Not only is it a completely opaque communication medium, but it won't be around when I need it six months from now. I put everything useful on a shared resource. CYA emails get printed to PDF and archived if necessary.

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Brittany Creamer 3 months ago 2 points
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I am such a fan of minimizing reliance on email. A one-to-one communication strategy is simply not as effective as a many-to-many tool. It's not just businesses resisting the change, though. Even my project groups at UT comprised soley of NetGeners find it difficult to stop pounding out emails with attachments and cc-ing everyone. My suggestion of using Google groups as a way to write documents for an assignment together (without those pesky meetings on campus) was revolutionary! I kid, but you would have thought I'd invented a time machine the way everyone stared at me like I was crazy. Thanks for advocating more collaborative and effective methods of communication. The more momentum that builds, the easier it will be to convince people to cross over!

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Daniel J. Pritchett 3 months ago 1 point
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I find that I spend a lot more time lately thinking of ways to enable my work groups to collaborate more efficiently. The hard part continues to be finding the courage (and the right time) to call them to action.

Maybe next time you could try a Facebook group for your project rather than a Google group? Those would probably be comfortably familiar
to your teammates.

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John Tropea 3 months ago 2 points
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Hey Daniel,

I have a post similar to this called Instead of sending an email...
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/09/08/ins...

Matt Moore has a presentation on re-purposing email
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/04/04/ema...

Here are some of my other post examining this issue:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/05/06/re-...
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/05/09/exa...
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/05/16/whe...

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Daniel J. Pritchett 3 months ago 1 point
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Thanks for the links, John! I've seen a lot of posts this year about the "abandon email entirely" movement. I'm not quite sure we need to go that far but it's doing a good job of making us think. I find myself using it far too often for the wrong purposes - probably because GMail is so fast and lets me search my archives so well.

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Louis Simoneau 1 month ago 1 point
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Yep, the ideal is to design a web-based system that conforms to the company's workflow and fires off e-mails to the appropriate parties when it's updated. That way you get the immediacy and targeted nature of email with all the benefits of a persistent online system.

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Daniel J. Pritchett 1 month ago 1 point
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I know there are some hot startups working on enterprise productivity suites like this, but I imagine what we'll see in the corporate world is cut-down versions of this functionality being ported in to Outlook and Notes. Have you gotten your hands on anything like this in the corporate sector?

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Louis Simoneau 1 month ago 1 point
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If by 'gotten your hands on' you mean 'designed and implemented' then yeah ;-) Web development frameworks are so flexible and adaptable these days that it's pretty easy to write use cases based on a company's specific workflow and implement a software solution that essentially replicates the email (or physical) communication structure in a persistent form.

While I respect the idea of making 'productivity suites' and such for corporate use, my opinion is that if you combine the total time it takes for everyone involved to learn how to use that kind of implementation, the cost will be higher than the design and development cost of a highly customized tool modeled to the specific needs of the organization (which avoids training costs by mimicking the pre-existing workflow).

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Daniel J. Pritchett 1 month ago 1 point
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So you're capturing emails at the server and piping them out into a web archive? I am not really saying that everyone ought to go and scrap their entire IT system and replace it with wikis and forums but it would certainly be nice to escape the "private by default" e-mail workflow culture we have now.

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Don’t E-Mail It!