The dictatorship of the inbox
E-mail turned 50 recently. And, contrary to rumours, it’s not going away. Organisations run on e-mail. It’s the oil of the office. Next time you’re in the office, take a look around the PCs and check what’s on their screens. Chances are it will be Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes (or similar). People live in their inboxes. Most get an instant notification whenever a new message arrives, which evokes a Pavlovian response to stop what they’re doing and open the message.
E-mail is good for many things: it can keep you up-to-date with internal and external news, it’s good for sharing information, it’s useful for recording decisions, and it’s great for summarising tasks and timescales. Because it’s asynchronous, it’s less disruptive than telephone calls or physical interruptions and gives you more control about when and where you deal with the inevitable questions and answers of everyday working life. But it’s dreadful for everything else, and it can be more disruptive and more controlling than you might realise.
E-mail is awful for decision making. Even deciding on the date and time of a meeting can cause chaos, with dozens of messages flying around in an incoherent mess. It’s much worse for making important decisions. The chaos isn’t helped by some people using “Reply to all”, some using “Reply” (to one person), and some not appearing to know the difference.
But the real problem with e-mail is its real strength. E-mail is democratic. It’s egalitarian. The CEO and the cleaner both have one e-mail address. They can both e-mail anyone. Their e-mails even look the same. It’s been claimed that this “flattens” the organisation and permits information to “flow up”. Perhaps. Most CEOs (and anyone else in a position to do so) have taken steps to un-flatten the organisation and stem this flow. The egalitarian nature of e-mail means that the message containing “You’re fired” looks the same as the one containing “Your turn the get the coffee”. Because every message looks the same, most people work through their e-mail in the order in which each message arrives, no matter who it’s from or what it’s about.
The egalitarian nature of e-mail means that the message containing “You’re fired” looks the same as the one containing “Your turn the get the coffee”.
The victims of this democracy are the people who do things. Real things. Like make things or fix things or sell things or think of new things. The shit flows up and down for them. They gets commands from above and queries from below. They get bogged down in their inbox — while their real work lies undone. Project managers, quality control, finance people and administrative staff bombard them with requests for updates and reminders about project slippage — while they are expected to create or produce but given little space or time to do so. We’ve created a system that is ideal for reducing productivity and creativity — and then trumpeting this from the Heavens.
There is also a hidden cost to e-mail. It’s not just the time to open, read and respond to a message. E-mail is disruptive. Every time a person receives a message, their thinking is interrupted, their workflow is stopped. That means that they’re not creating products. And products — not e-mails — make profits. These constant interruptions are OK if your entire day consists of small tasks. But they’re disastrous if you’re meant to do complex work.
The fans of e-mail will say: “But e-mail is productive”. It is? Try counting how many messages you receive on a given day are truly productive (in the sense of directly contributing to the creation or production of something). You’ll be lucky if it’s one in ten. The rest, essentially, work against productivity. The irony of e-mail is that the busiest people hate it and those with the least to do love it — and the latter’s (over-)use of it adds to the woes of the former.
Various solutions have been proposed. Perhaps the worst one is: ignore your inbox. Advocates of this approach claim that you should focus on the important stuff — the productive and creative stuff that you’re paid to do. Let the trivia pile up in your inbox. Who cares? Yeah, right. Your boss cares. Your reputation cares. Your career cares. Given the choice between doing your job or doing your inbox, do your inbox. Your family will thank you.
So what can you do? The obvious answer is: do both. Keep on top of your inbox and be creative and productive. Except you can’t. At least not for long. Sure, you can attack your inbox, and feel the pleasure of a zero inbox for a few days, but it’s not sustainable. The truth is that it’s your inbox or your outbox.
“Sure, you can attack your inbox, and feel the pleasure of a zero inbox for a few days, but it’s not sustainable. The truth is that it’s your inbox or your outbox.
The correct answer is: do your inbox. And hope that you escape (or get promoted) before anyone notices that you haven’t produced anything. The problem with this is that’s it’s probably not good for you and it’s definitely not good for your company. But it’s the smart option for your career and your sanity.
So what can be done? There’s no easy answer. But there are things organisations can do.
- Educate people. People don’t know how to use e-mail. Why should they? Their training typically consists of how to load the program and send a message. People need to be educated about when and how to use e-mail. The when involves educating people about what e-mail is good for and when it should — and shouldn’t — be used. It means explaining the hidden costs of e-mail and its potential to disrupt. The how involves training people on how to use the features of their e-mail program to help them deal with their messages.
- Tame your inbox. E-mail programs, such as Outlook, have tools to help you control your inbox. You can set up folders, create rules and set flags on messages. It’s simple to set up rules to direct incoming messages to specific folders. For example, all the messages from an online group can be automatically sent to a purpose-made folder for the group; or messages about “Stationary” can be sent to your “Other stuff” folder. One of the most useful rules is to send all messages that are copied to you to a “cc” folder (these should not require action by you). The trick is to reduce the flow of messages into your (main) inbox.
- Use alternatives. There are better ways of doing some things than e-mail. Web services, such as Doodle, can be used for arranging meetings. There are dedicated tools for carrying out discussions. Yammer is one of them. Yammer takes conversations and decision making out of your inbox and puts them where they belong — in a dedicated, threaded discussion, designed for interaction and conversations. Moving discussions to an alternative platform will not only relieve your inbox of this burden but also improve decision making.
- Stop sending so many e-mails. Just stop. And turn off those damn notifications.
Taken together, these four, relatively simple, actions will relax the stranglehold of e-mail. It still has an important role to play in business communications but, as it turns 50, it’s time to put e-mail into semi-retirement.
