Reinventing email

Email is like oxygen – it is essential to sustain life on this planet, and yet too much of it makes one dizzy. Many people are trying to “reinvent email.” Here is my little contribution.

The problem with email is that senders do not have a way of organizing their thoughts in a systematic and predictable fashion. We process information better and quicker when it follows a pattern. However, in half emails I struggle to determine what exactly the sender wants me to do, if anything. It is not because they are poorly written; not at all. After all, most emails I get are from faculty and other administrators. Those are all highly educated people with great writing skills. I do not miss struggling through undergrads’ messages! Still, in longer e-mails, it is especially difficult to grasp the genre of every message, because there are several. It would be so cool to know in advance, which is that – an artful epistolary piece, or a rambling manifesto, or a dry request for funding.

We all practice speed reading, which does not work so well. I miss important nuances because they were buried in the middle of the third paragraph. As every reading professor knows, you can only fake comprehension so far. As many others, I am also guilty of not identifying the genre of my messages clearly.

To make more time for reading emails, we recruited our smart phones. As a result, millions of emails are now read over urinals. I am thinking it is time to install phone holders on the walls just above every urinal, to keep hands free and the whole affair a little more hygienic. I don’t know what women do, but I am sure there is a business opportunity there, too. This is not good, of course. You cannot cheat time by slicing it into smaller pieces. Other people just do not read and respond. This is a symptom of a serious condition, an admission of defeat. It is also very disruptive to the organization to have people who habitually ignore correspondence. (Of course, sometimes a non-answer is the intended answer, but how would you know?). The real solution is to do less reading, more thinking. We all want those who send emails to do the work of editing, and organizing information for us. But we do not want to do the same when we’re the senders. Email onto others as you would like emailed onto you.

The real solution it is about nudging senders to organize their information. Companies figured it out a long time ago, and on most websites, you cannot just send an e-mail without answering some screening questions first. They will at least force you to choose among several pre-defined subjects: do you have login issues? Do you have a technical problem? Do you want a refund? At the extreme, corporate monsters like Facebook, Google, or Microsoft do not want any emails from you at all. It is too expensive to read. If you want help, you will be sent to forums, in search for people who already had the same problem, and it was resolved. You are forced to meander across the corpses of dead conversations in search for a morsel of useful information. I think Microsoft had invented this many years ago – there was the Microsoft/kb – knowledge base…

I don’t want that. I don’t want people to stop writing to me. Most of things I know are from faculty and staff, and the generous information flow is essential for me. I don’t want to appear to be less approachable. I don’t mind reading e-mails; just want to do it a little more efficiently. So, I am inviting everyone to pilot this new little tool at tinyurl.com/emailSasha. Let me know if this is annoying, or useful. If it helps to clarify the intent of a message, or makes it more obscure. Do you see a good way of improving it? How do you make the options fit the message better, without creating a huge list? This is strictly voluntary; feel free to use the regular email!

If this works, we can perhaps think of ways of dealing with student email intended for faculty. They often strike us as both impolite and poorly written. Perhaps a little training tool could make them both easier to digest and more valuable (in the educational sense) to write?