Interrupted

The way we communicate with email has hardly changed since my working life began in the 1990s. Personal computers were by then ubiquitous and increasingly connected to the nascent internet. E-mail was heralded as an efficiency booster beyond compare, however some argue that it has instead made us miserable.

Cal Newport’s A World Without Email is a critique of email usage and its effect on our ability to get things done. Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. As an academic he is no doubt subject to the administrative overload caused by the corporatisation of higher level institutions. (The comparison to how his grandfather worked, also a Professor, is telling.)

The average knowledge worker now checks email every six minutes.

The modern office worker spends an increasing proportion of their day checking email at the expense of unbroken work. The author calls this phenomenon the ‘hyperactive hive mind’. As a beekeeper it’s an analogy I am not fond of, but I get the idea. Newport explores the problems raised by this constant state of connectivity, by examining the thing located between the chair and the computer screen.

Connected

As human beings we have an innate need to connect with others. In a University College London study of the Mbendjele BaYaka (hunter-gatherers in the Republic of Congo) the ‘relational wealth’ of individuals was measured by counting the honey sticks that were passed to them by other members of the tribe. By electronically tagging individuals these interactions were recorded and analysed, and shown to be crucial for the social cohesion of the group. An important finding of the study was that one-to-one conversations were absolutely critical in establishing these links.

Does email communication allow us to exchange tidbits as well as computer bits? The answer, according to Newport, is no. One reason for this is our propensity to egocentrism in email communications, with frequent misunderstandings between the transmitter and the receiver. Not only does the sender assume their own interpretation of the text without properly articulating it, but the recipient reads unintended meaning in the exchange based on their own overconfident assessment.

Digital body language

The sheer volume of emails sent is therefore undermined by the paucity of information they convey. To improve our communication in the digital realm we are turning to new methods to avoid ambiguity and infuse emotional cues into our messages.

306 billon emails are sent every day.

The use of exclamation marks and emojis can be used to help express ourselves, Erica Dhawan proclaims in Digital Body Language1. How this compares with true synchronous human interactions is something worth considering.

Another emerging convention in digital communication is the avoidance of full-stops (periods) to punctuate sentences, which is seen by some as conveying aggression. Large chunks of text that have no punctuation whatsoever are not easy to follow. As a reader I ignore these passages 100% of the time. Life is just too short. I’m not convinced that emojis carry a whole lot of emotional nuance and they risk causing a pictogram ‘arms race’ :expressionless:

Dhawan’s four (all alliterative) laws of digital body language are:

  1. Value Visibly
  2. Communicate Carefully
  3. Collaborate Confidently
  4. Trust Totally

She maintains that people generally expect email responses within twenty-four hours. To my mind this timeframe sounds like a throwback to postal cycles, with many senders now expecting a detailed response within an hour or two. I do, however, support the idea that the enforced adoption of remote working makes it even more imperative to establish better email etiquette.

EMAIL IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT

If we stop questioning how we manage our inboxes we end up being managed by our message alerts. This makes busy work the priority. The productivity benefits of email were quickly overtaken by its inherent inefficiencies (IBM experienced over five times more email than expected when their servers were switched on) and yet we continue to cling to the badge of honour of overflowing mailboxes. We must challenge email on the beaches and on the landing grounds; the bed-side locker and the holiday cottage.

The war on email requires a long term strategy to succeed. In the meantime we need tactical solutions for the problem at hand. Selective silencing of message notifications is a good place to start. Email triaging techniques such as exporting messages to task management systems and automation (like the inimitable Dr Drang’s spam rules script for Mac users) are a useful next step. It is not possible to change the expectations of others quite so easily. Nonetheless, the careful use of standard responses and boiler-plate text can help to manage expectations and provide reassurance that the matter is being handled.

A World Without Email includes a series of case studies to illustrate alternatives to email. Analogue and digital solutions, or a combination of both, are suggested. As a technophile I’m drawn to computerised solutions2 as long as they add value. Newport’s case studies centre on Kanban cards and dashboard systems that provide project overviews, with team review being an essential component for clear delineation of workflows. My preference is to connect emails to related documents with deep file links and message URLs or use custom meta data and tags. However, these workflows don’t provide the perspectives offered by Kanban and similar techniques.

Another solution proposed by Newport is the reconfiguration of roles within organisations. Specialists should not be treated as general purpose workers that spend their days ping-ponging about meeting availability and perfunctorily engaging in ever-expanding email threads of irrelevance. Moreover, he recommends that support units should co-ordinate their activities to minimise disruption to valuable knowledge work. I think it’s important to add that service providers themselves are possibly the hardest hit by email overload, so this is a two-way street.

Zoom out

Remote working is mentioned in Newport’s book but it is not the main topic. It is conceivable that online meetings will be viewed with the same hushed abhorrence by some knowledge workers as email is today. Alex Lindsay, a digital pioneer in computer graphics and video production, is also a visionary for new technologies. His Office Hours initiative is at the leading edge of online events and his opinions on so-called ‘Zoom fatigue’ are authoritative. He believes it’s an issue that can be fixed with good production values. In either case, I feel we must avoid overuse of any medium that is detrimental to basic human needs.

Educate together

In third class in primary school I wrote a project entitled Communication using a set of World Book encyclopaedias as my sole source of research, tomes in which the 1960s will forever be the future. The weird thing is, the 1960s still is the future when it comes to email. The productivity revolution that occurred in manufacturing since Ford’s auto-assembly line has not been witnessed in computer based knowledge work, despite its promising inception. If this is a prospect that seems frightening, consider how it compares to today’s experience of interminable emails sapping our ability to perform meaningful tasks.

Newport points to a future in which knowledge workers preserve autonomy but are enmeshed in processes that enable constructive work. Slavishly gulping the fire-hose of email messages will not achieve these objectives. We must encourage others to reconsider poor email practices by altering our own behaviour. When the pandemic has receded perhaps we will pause to consider how to communicate better in a hybrid work environment. I look forward to the revolution when it comes.

This page was last updated on Jul 4, 2021 12:38

  1. I confess I haven’t read Dhawan’s book and am basing my comments on the Bookworm podcast about it. ↩

  2. Although I’m a Kindle ebook advocate I’ve recently re-discovered the enjoyment of printed books (like Newport’s) although I find myself glancing at the top right-hand-side of the page to check the time. ↩