Posts Tagged 'email'

Email and the two aspects of the Paper Trail

Posted on February 17th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

One of the well known reasons why people create lots of unnecessary email in an organization is that they want to create a paper trail – written proof that they did something, or said something, or objected to something, so that at a later time they can assert that they did so when someone tries to shift some blame to them. Of course this is a symptom of a dysfunction in the organizational culture they work in; in a properly run operation there would be no unfair finger pointing, one’s word would be proof enough, and people could focus on.. Read more

Five ways to prevent gaffes in email

Posted on February 8th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The horror stories abound. A careless click on Send, and incalculable damage befalls a sensitive business deal or workplace relationship. Or the sender can become a joke. Or worse. This is not new; even before email, a careless letter could do much damage if it fell into the wrong hands, or was written in haste. I still keep a mimeographed letter sent by the HR manager of a company to all its employees, where his typist dropped a single letter in the phrase “To: all employees”. Unfortunately for him, this was in Hebrew, and the accidentally misspelled phrase read “To:.. Read more

Preemptive Escalation and Email Overload

Posted on January 13th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Being Preemptive is usually good: for example, preemptive maintenance beats reactive repair any day, right? But recently I encountered an organization where people were using Preemptive Escalation. What was going on is that when someone sent a coworker an email asking them to do something, the recipient’s boss would be added to the message, as pressure on the recipient to respond. Of course escalation – letting the boss know that someone is unresponsive – is an old device, and a useful one; but usually it is a second level method, applied after the direct message had failed to achieve its.. Read more

Stop hoarding information for a rainy day

Posted on December 29th, 2009 · Posted in Individual Solutions

Here’s a story from the early nineties, a time when much information in the workplace was stored and moved on sheets of mashed tree pulp. Back then I was doing research into Artificial Neural Networks, and my coworkers at Intel got into the habit of mailing me (in an inter-office envelope) a copy of any article on the subject that they came across. And I got into the habit of piling the articles at the corner of my desk, so that I might read them one day when I had the time. After all, they were articles in my field.. Read more

Email overload: snowflakes or terror birds?

Posted on December 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster. But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to.. Read more

The difference between Tips and Rules

Posted on November 17th, 2009 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

A common practice in companies that try to reduce information overload is to provide to employees guidelines promoting proper e-mail etiquette (where by etiquette I mean crafting messages to be less disruptive, and more beneficial, to others: “Write clear subject lines” is about etiquette; “only process email twice a day” is not). These guidelines, though usually not sufficient to solve the problem, are certainly a useful component in a solution program; but it’s important to be crystal clear about their classification: are they Tips or Rules? To illustrate: Tip: Make your messages as short as possible. Rule: No message in.. Read more

The way we were: messaging before the email overload era

Posted on November 13th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A friend in a US Hi-tech company once commented to me that all this business communication that is manifesting itself as email overload is nothing new: we also had this in the days before email, even if it used paper instead of computer screens. We called it Correspondence, he said. And then he added: We devoted a couple of hours a week to it; the rest of the time, we worked… The difference, of course, is that then, it took two hours a week, where today – the data shows – it takes ten times as much. That’s the problem… Read more

Email Overload and The Little Prince

Posted on November 2nd, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Email Overload is one affliction that people accept more or less willingly. Nobody’s holding a gun to their head, after all. So why are knowledge workers doing this to themselves? We’ll be discussing many causes in this blog, but today I want to probe a remark made by a friend: he observes many knowledge workers who feel that getting lots of email enhances their status. Basically they’re saying “Watch me – I’m important, I get lots of mail and I’m busy handling all of it!” This absurd position reminds me of a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s immortal “The Little.. Read more

To attach, or not to attach?

Posted on October 27th, 2009 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

There I was, flying across the Atlantic and blogging. Continental now have AC power under every seat, so I could use my notebook as long as I wanted; and the first thing I did was clean out my email. Except for the few messages that included a URL and a description intriguing enough to make me want to check the full article they pointed at. For that I had to wait to be on Terra Firma. It would’ve been better had the senders pasted the entire article. Which reminds me that some years ago, the idea of sending pointers instead.. Read more

Should we remove the pesky Reply to All?

Posted on October 23rd, 2009 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

There are many technology solutions that help reduce information overload, with varying degrees of success; I’ll be reviewing many of them in this blog. But the simplest of these is this: remove the Reply to All (RTA) button from the email client! Technically, this is trivial to implement, a simple customization. But it is interesting to study the reactions the idea elicits. Reply to All is a major pain point in the enterprise; not that it doesn’t have many valid and useful uses, but there are always a sufficient number of people around who will send a Reply to All.. Read more