The Problem with E-mail

The Problem with E-mail - via Stanley Kubrick and Leonard Rossiter

Mostly I don’t work in a conventional office. Most are larger than my 2.47 m². They have more people in them. But I’m fascinated by office culture. We all are. Because it shows people at their worst. The best sitcoms work by trapping people in an artificial situation. That’s a dictionary definition of an office. Hence we get: Reggie Perrin, The IT Crowd and, well, The Office.

I think people show themselves at their worst worst when using e-mail. I’m not quite sure why – it really is a very useful tool. This article offers some insight, it is useful, just so much so that we try to do everything with it.

Like any written communication, without genuine care you risk being misunderstood. I spend a lot of my time in quiet bemusement as I see people in fury/confusion/damage-limitation as some text/update/tweet has been misunderstood/inappropriately used/taken a massive swingeing kick at some hornets’ nest. As humans – we don’t seem to learn. If they re-made Dr Strangelove (Hollywood; don’t), it wouldn’t be implausible for the Doomsday machine to be triggered by an ambiguously worded e-missive.

When they imagined the future it was always videophones. Of course it was. Spoken word and conversation get two people to the same point. Add visual cues, and it’s unbeatable. They didn’t imagine text on teeny screens. But when we invent the videophone, we go to e-mail before we talk, let alone Skype/facetime. Even for a difficult or sensitive conversation, we’re like moths to a gas lamp, always drawn to this limited technology. 

The problem is that it’s temptingly quick. We can’t break the loop. So we invent ways around it. Every time I open a browser version of my e-mails, it’s introduced a new way to organise them. Or, in my experience, to hide or confusingly re-arrange them. Then companies introduce Yammer or Slack or somesuch to enable better conversation. From my observation, they fail more often than succeed.

For me -– it’s not the tool, it’s the use. I am as bad an e-culprit as anyone, but I self-impose some rules. Max 16 e-mails in my inbox; 10 or fewer is ideal. That requires sub-rules. At times I need to stop what I’m really doing to manage that. But otherwise I’d feel swamped, and/or keep chopping and changing. For the main, I stay off of an evening/weekend. Then there’s a glorious fortnight each summer when I turn off my data entirely. And if the topic is hard or complex; I talk.

My question is, how many take control in in a fluid, tech environment? How many just let it happen to them? Can people do it naturally, or do they need support? And if they need support, where from

There’s a parallel here with work-life balance, and I’ll return to that next time.