Why do people hate email so much? (Because they haven't mastered it yet, Grasshopper, but anyway...) The thing is, it's communication. Are we shocked that a big chunk of our work burden is the burden of communication?
"He spent 1/3 of his time at work answering emails!" Outrageous!
vs.
"He spent 1/3 of his time at work communicating with the other workers." Yeah sounds about right, if not a little low.
The other thing nagging at me is that this feels like Cal Newport woke up one day, got annoyed at his inbox and wrote a whole book about it. I'm all for re-thinking and re-designing, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of people who hate email or whatever, and want to re-make the world in that image. It's like the people who get all pissy when it's raining out. Tony Soprano would say, ay it's fuckin' raining, but whaddyagonnadoo.
Interruptions, yes, those are harmful. But that's why there's email. I guarantee an email is easier to delay than someone calling, instant-messaging or physically approaching you. It's got "mail" right there in the name; far as I'm concerned that means you have free license to delay for a day or multiple days, just like the postal service. Check it once or twice a day, during times when you're not trying to concentrate, and then close out of it. Anything useful, copy it to where it belongs (task list, calendar, etc.). If it needs action at some point, mark it "Pending." After that, archive that shit and forget it. If you get too much, tell people to stop sending it. Or just take so long replying that they stop. I dunno.
I love email. It is just text, it is truly asynchronous (as in: nobody expects you to answer within a minute) it is sortable, searchanle, you can create automatic filters, everybody has email.
But the best thing is: you have to write everything into _one_ email. I don't have to follow someones fragmented train of thought and glue the shards together in order to make sense of them. No: they want something from me and so the burden of sorting their thoughts is on them.
I also don't hate chats, or a phone call, however this is for different communications. If you do important stuff everybody should know via chat (or worse: recorded speech messages in a chat) you might be doing it wrong.
I know someone whos boss would send multiple 15 min speech messages a day into a group chat to all employees. To find the information you needed to know you would have to listen through the whole thing, write it down for yourself etc. And this times 40 employees just because one person didn't bother.
I’m creating an account just to reply to this, and for some context: I’m a big Cal Newport fan.
He isn’t arguing against the use of email, but the non intentional default to emailing instead of work. Yes, your ideal scenario- communication between employees will get work done. But in Cal’s scenarios, that one person is having multiple conversations like that through email, and is waiting for the other person to reply. And instead of producing deliverables, they are having these slow conversations.
You mention just get to the email later, but rarely does the application or notification go away after the info is gathered. So your plan of checking email 1-3 times a day is right inline with Cal’s thinking.
Some of his solutions he hand waives away complexities with “we’ll rock and roll” but the idea is email won’t be a springboard for work. It sends pdf’s and reports and minutes great, but planning a project is better done elsewhere.
Anytime anyone wants to change something and they give you one of these reasons, run away! 1) We want to modernize it 2) X is so 1990's 3) It is old fashioned.
That means that person is grounded in fashion/trends/what-others-think and not objectivity.
Email didn't come with a date stamped on it - "Hey this technology must be used in 1990-2010 era". For the love of the god people, think from the bottom up. Stop following trends like headless zombies.
Just the other day someone on HN was proposing a better UX/UI for cars without explaining in detail 1) what are the downsides of current steering wheel and 2 or 3 pedals 2) What are the upsides of their idea. Without significant justification for 1) and 2), you ain't changing anything. Stop ruining the world, please.
I think most people that think they hate email just hate Outlook. Some MS product manager decided that it would force you to top post, and then endlessly growing but completely indecipherable quote vomit below the message became the norm.
Back in the day, email was great. A listserv targeted to a specific community of people that know their netiquette is the best way to collaborate.
> everyone got an email address and most lost their assistants
This is important. In the 90s I was working in an office with a half dozen other people, and the director had a secretary who also managed the office. She handled things like everyone's travel bookings, routine administrative stuff, and the like. And she was good at it. Fast forward to today and all but the most senior people spend days dealing with corporate systems to book travel, do expense reports, requisitioning things for our computers and laptops, and other assorted administrivia. In academia even tenured professors do it themselves. And these corporate portals are terrible. Now consider the scenario (set aside pandemic live for now) where a team of programmers working in two or three different offices around the country needs an in-person event. Instead of having one person, who is familiar with the systems and rules and is very good at navigating them, you have half a dozen highly paid professionals blowing half a day or more each wrangling up travel and accommodations. It's such a huge waste of people's time.
Fire the expert admins and have non-experts waste a large amount of expensive time on things they're bad at - sounds like a plan.
On the other hand, it can be much more satisfying to book your own travel and accommodations vs. having a corporate travel department book the cheapest, most inconvenient, and most unpleasant travel and lodging they can find - which is also generally non-negotiable and impossible to change. (And often designed to reinforce the status hierarchy - management get nice suites and business class while rank and file get stuck with cramped rooms, room-shares, economy class, etc..) The incentives are usually not aligned with employee interests. The administrative overhead of making one's own arrangements sometimes pays off in spades.
Doesn't this tie into a lot what's going on currently such as the work from home controversy?
At my previous employer, the definition of a successful employee was someone who did anything anyone asked of him enthusiastically. This included but was not limited to, massive overtime, answering e-mails, texts and phone calls day or night. Being available on weekends and Holidays. Agreeing to arbitrary deadlines, always being on slack. etc.
Once, the VP sent me an email at 4:30am. at 7:30am he called my direct boss to ask why I hadn't answered him. My bosses response, "I assume he is sleeping, like I was."
I also once managed a team in India, it was awful. I would wake up to an inbox full of questions, so I'd start answering their questions, head into work, and do any legwork needed, write them extensive instructions, then start my own work for the day. Just about the time I'd get home, they'd be waking up and stumbling into the office asking for clarification on my first e-mails. I actually physically became sick due to the lack of sleep, stress, etc. Meetings with them were either in the middle of the night for them or myself.
It's only the engineers sometimes myopic viewpoint which assumes everyone is seeking efficiency. I want the efficiency which is most meaningful to me-- to spend the least amount of time at work and produce the most, so I can have a predictable life and spend time doing things that are more meaningful to me.
I think the real answer is that managers in many environments don't actually care about efficiency. I think they view it almost in the opposite way. The more they put on you, the more you may accomplish, the better "value" they're getting from you.
> Fixing the hive-mind is going to be a billion dollar industry
Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.
I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.
You know 17 years ago I used to work at a company that only delivered email at 5 minutes before the hour (9:55, 10:55, etc) and then didn’t deliver email at all between 9pm and sometime in the morning like 4am or 5am. It was amazing. Email from customers were delivered immediately as were internal emails if you marked it high importance (with the “!”).
I’m a longtime Thomas Sowell fan but I only just recently started reading his most celebrated work, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. In one of the early chapters there is a reference to the old physical mailbox systems of pre-networked offices, and how the cost of distracted attention from hundreds of employees never seems to deter managers from dumping all manner of low-value correspondence into said boxes.
Email and Slack may have kicked this problem into overdrive, but managers’ inability to efficiently organize knowledge work appears to be a long-standing open problem.
People are focusing on the mention of email but that's just a detail. What Newport is really onto here is horrible state of office organization, of which having to deal with email is just a symptom.
The hive mind arises because instead of having 1 or two people handle things like coordinating a meeting, everyone involved has to coordinate with everyone else.
> Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human switchboards, answering and forwarding dozens of emails on any and every topic to keep the system from seizing up.
You could take out "email" and replace it with "slack threads" or "text messages", or just about any other tech, and you'd still have the same problem: there's no sane organization any more, just a bunch of people running around trying to connect and work with each other.
I'm only part way through the book, but agree with this assessment.
I know I try to create ways of automating or semi-automating things to not be in e-mail or slack. The problem I have is that people just direct their reports to e-mail me or @me in slack. I think that's likely because of the "hyperactive hivemind" where that's the quickest way for them to move a task on.
Likewise I see the problem he mentions where people half-ass an e-mail just to move it out of their inbox. I have to fight not to do that myself and it's usually when someone wants "one thing", but that one thing is actually 3+ high level things with other sub-tasks that need to be accomplished.
"And if any individual tries to opt out and focus on one thing for an entire day, they’re throwing a wrench in the ‘hyperactive hive mind’, which explains why calls for individual discipline have done so little to fix the problem."
Another HN thread recently linked the essay "Meditations on Moloch," which among other things talks about multi-polar traps, things like the prisoner's dilemma in which the players are incentivized to defect. I never thought of the email problem this way, but it definitely feels right now that I think about it.
I'm privileged to work somewhere where my bosses specifically tell me to turn off my email and just pair program with someone, but honestly I still leave my chats up and allow myself to be constantly diverted. I've clearly internalized this way of working and the fear of being "rude" or whatever by not instantaneously responding to the point where it's the natural way I work. This is in spite of the fact that it's something I work to break out of.
> Usually after six hours of real actual work they need to go home and rest.
People think I'm nuts when I bring up a 6 hour work day. I do my best work in 6 hours, the rest isn't my best even if I'm still productive. Things I do during my personal time are part of what I bring to the table. When work takes away from fulfillment outside of work then I have less to offer.
Every single communication product that I tried which was meant to replace email, had a worse impact on my productivity than email itself.
If you want to change the rules of communication in the workplace, sure let's have a discussion. But that doesn't have anything to do with email vs. some other tool.
If you think the problem is some protocol (as in email protocol) or some client[1]... Then my BS detector will go off.
[1] I recognise that some email clients are better than others. It should also be noted that email is one of the few communication modes where you are free to choose whatever client you want, so thee argument "email is bad because Client X is bad" doesn't really hold.
99% of things are not urgent, and people should not be expected to be available instantaneously. But implementing that requires discipline on the part of the person sending the message.
This seems good but falls apart with.long approval chains (which are maybe the core issue).
If I need library PR approved so I can make a service 1 PR so I can make a production release request so that I can deploy a one line change then it's hard to get things done with 4 hour ping time.
I get the sense that the real problem isn't so much synchronous communication but the need to get information or reconcile state with a specific person. If any team member was equally capable of providing input, each individual would only have to poll 1/n as often
> By contrast, most knowledge work today operates with no deliberate structure at all. Instead of carefully constructed processes to get the most out of each person, we just hand out tasks and leave people to organise themselves organically in whatever way feels easiest to them.
I've very much felt this pain in a few of my roles. I understand the need for this sort of many-hats-wearing, elbow-greased approach to solving business problems in a startup. But it's infuriating working in late-stage startups (or even mid-sized tech companies) that fail to get away from this 'throw people at the problem' mentality and spend the time and resources to explicitly define what the business' core processes are and how they work.
I know not everyone thinks about problems in terms of process flows, but it still drives me crazy!
I think The Phoenix Project does a pretty good job of diagnosing the problem: in knowledge work, the WIP is generally not visible. Not only that, the WIP often consists of simply entries in a database or files on a hard drive, so there is effectively an infinite capacity for creating and storing more WIP.
Even with well-defined processes, poor instrumentation for revealing the true scale of the backlog at each stage can lead to this “always firefighting” mode of operation.
I love email, ya it takes some control and if your organization is out of control it can suck. But I love the entire concept.
I can email anyone in the world, that is mind blowing. I've gotten amazing responses from authors whose books I love, people I admire, old friends I lost contact with and found, etc...
Here are my shower thoughts on this subject - since I have been bombarded with emails at all times, and been guilty of now having to address them.
In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email.
1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to.
The receiver gets the email asap, and because he receives less emails, he can address it. Like a hot potato, if there is more info he needs, he can pass it around the same way.
Everyone else is on cc or bcc - and these folks get it delivered to them as #2 below.
This email has only 1 person in the 'To' field, and if there are many, then the system makes it so that everyone in the 'To' field get the email as #2 below.
2) The FYI email - this email is sent by the sender, but is kept in a safe place till the receiver pulls for it.
The sender is made aware that the receiver has pulled for it or not, and if the sender is not satisfied with the speed of response, this email can be upgraded into #1.
---
I think this does not change too much of the systems, just small tweaks to workflow, and is something that can be achieved if the team puts their mind to it.
Front[1] is for customer-facing teams but functions roughly like this.
Teams collaborate on a shared inbox but Rules can route emails so they only show up in one individual’s inbox. With this setup, everyone else can still text or tag search and find the email but it’s only in the inbox of the person it is assigned to. If you are the lead for a given project then you’ll receive the client emails in your inbox but the rest of your team in To: or CC: will not. If you used to be the lead for something, handed it off months ago, and the client continues to include you on emails, you won’t see those emails because they’ll be assigned to the current lead.
edit: I guess this is still missing the sender intent component. A similar setup to what I mentioned above could be created for a single gmail inbox using rules and folders but the system falls apart without the sender being in on it.
Simply don't understand this, I am not person with great writing skills, but I prefer email most of the time, because to me it is more concise communication medium without time pressure, when it is up to me, usually my work pattern is like this ( emails -> chart -> may be meeting ) or ( emails -> meeting(s) ).
'Email' seems to be a trigger word for a lot of people, but I never see Slack or IM mentioned in these discussions. Slack is just as disruptive in my experience.
I long for the days when email was the only medium of electronic communication. Now it's email, Slack, Basecamp, Teams, Jira and Zoom.
These thing’s are highly subjective and being on both ends of the spectrum doesn’t help someone. Email is bad no; email are perfect of course not. As long as it make your life easier and productive it’s a good thing.
Email is just a tool. Unlike powertools it doesn't remove limbs or leave gaping wounds, but you still have to use it safely and in a manner that doesn't destroy your productivity and mental health.
Personally, I don't even have email running all day. I just start the mail client about an hour before I am leaving the office, answer the important emails, delete or forward most others. And I get lots of work done!
Disagree with the host that the net effect of 10x increase on productivity on climate change would be a wash. If production capacity increases that much faster than social consciousness and direction of capital, the result will be catastrophic for climate change. Boosting productivity should be explicitly done in tandem with using that increase in a way that's beneficial to humanity and not just profitable.
[+] [-] rdiddly|4 years ago|reply
"He spent 1/3 of his time at work answering emails!" Outrageous!
vs.
"He spent 1/3 of his time at work communicating with the other workers." Yeah sounds about right, if not a little low.
The other thing nagging at me is that this feels like Cal Newport woke up one day, got annoyed at his inbox and wrote a whole book about it. I'm all for re-thinking and re-designing, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of people who hate email or whatever, and want to re-make the world in that image. It's like the people who get all pissy when it's raining out. Tony Soprano would say, ay it's fuckin' raining, but whaddyagonnadoo.
Interruptions, yes, those are harmful. But that's why there's email. I guarantee an email is easier to delay than someone calling, instant-messaging or physically approaching you. It's got "mail" right there in the name; far as I'm concerned that means you have free license to delay for a day or multiple days, just like the postal service. Check it once or twice a day, during times when you're not trying to concentrate, and then close out of it. Anything useful, copy it to where it belongs (task list, calendar, etc.). If it needs action at some point, mark it "Pending." After that, archive that shit and forget it. If you get too much, tell people to stop sending it. Or just take so long replying that they stop. I dunno.
[+] [-] atoav|4 years ago|reply
But the best thing is: you have to write everything into _one_ email. I don't have to follow someones fragmented train of thought and glue the shards together in order to make sense of them. No: they want something from me and so the burden of sorting their thoughts is on them.
I also don't hate chats, or a phone call, however this is for different communications. If you do important stuff everybody should know via chat (or worse: recorded speech messages in a chat) you might be doing it wrong.
I know someone whos boss would send multiple 15 min speech messages a day into a group chat to all employees. To find the information you needed to know you would have to listen through the whole thing, write it down for yourself etc. And this times 40 employees just because one person didn't bother.
[+] [-] onetimename|4 years ago|reply
He isn’t arguing against the use of email, but the non intentional default to emailing instead of work. Yes, your ideal scenario- communication between employees will get work done. But in Cal’s scenarios, that one person is having multiple conversations like that through email, and is waiting for the other person to reply. And instead of producing deliverables, they are having these slow conversations.
You mention just get to the email later, but rarely does the application or notification go away after the info is gathered. So your plan of checking email 1-3 times a day is right inline with Cal’s thinking.
Some of his solutions he hand waives away complexities with “we’ll rock and roll” but the idea is email won’t be a springboard for work. It sends pdf’s and reports and minutes great, but planning a project is better done elsewhere.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
That means that person is grounded in fashion/trends/what-others-think and not objectivity.
Email didn't come with a date stamped on it - "Hey this technology must be used in 1990-2010 era". For the love of the god people, think from the bottom up. Stop following trends like headless zombies.
Just the other day someone on HN was proposing a better UX/UI for cars without explaining in detail 1) what are the downsides of current steering wheel and 2 or 3 pedals 2) What are the upsides of their idea. Without significant justification for 1) and 2), you ain't changing anything. Stop ruining the world, please.
[+] [-] cwp|4 years ago|reply
Back in the day, email was great. A listserv targeted to a specific community of people that know their netiquette is the best way to collaborate.
[+] [-] xkeysc0re|4 years ago|reply
"You don't wanna work in the rain, go try out for the Yankees." ~ Season 1 Episode 5, "College"
[+] [-] tj-teej|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|4 years ago|reply
This is important. In the 90s I was working in an office with a half dozen other people, and the director had a secretary who also managed the office. She handled things like everyone's travel bookings, routine administrative stuff, and the like. And she was good at it. Fast forward to today and all but the most senior people spend days dealing with corporate systems to book travel, do expense reports, requisitioning things for our computers and laptops, and other assorted administrivia. In academia even tenured professors do it themselves. And these corporate portals are terrible. Now consider the scenario (set aside pandemic live for now) where a team of programmers working in two or three different offices around the country needs an in-person event. Instead of having one person, who is familiar with the systems and rules and is very good at navigating them, you have half a dozen highly paid professionals blowing half a day or more each wrangling up travel and accommodations. It's such a huge waste of people's time.
[+] [-] carlmr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musicale|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand, it can be much more satisfying to book your own travel and accommodations vs. having a corporate travel department book the cheapest, most inconvenient, and most unpleasant travel and lodging they can find - which is also generally non-negotiable and impossible to change. (And often designed to reinforce the status hierarchy - management get nice suites and business class while rank and file get stuck with cramped rooms, room-shares, economy class, etc..) The incentives are usually not aligned with employee interests. The administrative overhead of making one's own arrangements sometimes pays off in spades.
[+] [-] oceanghost|4 years ago|reply
At my previous employer, the definition of a successful employee was someone who did anything anyone asked of him enthusiastically. This included but was not limited to, massive overtime, answering e-mails, texts and phone calls day or night. Being available on weekends and Holidays. Agreeing to arbitrary deadlines, always being on slack. etc.
Once, the VP sent me an email at 4:30am. at 7:30am he called my direct boss to ask why I hadn't answered him. My bosses response, "I assume he is sleeping, like I was."
I also once managed a team in India, it was awful. I would wake up to an inbox full of questions, so I'd start answering their questions, head into work, and do any legwork needed, write them extensive instructions, then start my own work for the day. Just about the time I'd get home, they'd be waking up and stumbling into the office asking for clarification on my first e-mails. I actually physically became sick due to the lack of sleep, stress, etc. Meetings with them were either in the middle of the night for them or myself.
It's only the engineers sometimes myopic viewpoint which assumes everyone is seeking efficiency. I want the efficiency which is most meaningful to me-- to spend the least amount of time at work and produce the most, so I can have a predictable life and spend time doing things that are more meaningful to me.
I think the real answer is that managers in many environments don't actually care about efficiency. I think they view it almost in the opposite way. The more they put on you, the more you may accomplish, the better "value" they're getting from you.
[+] [-] peterhartree|4 years ago|reply
Cal Newport was one of the inspirations for https://inboxwhenready.org. At this point, people have paid me over $100K to make it harder for them to read their email.
I've made some effort to persuade the Gmail and Superhuman teams to take this issue seriously, but to no avail, yet. If anyone here is building an email client or popular Gmail extension, I'm happy to talk about this stuff whenever.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cylde_frog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkhdigital|4 years ago|reply
Email and Slack may have kicked this problem into overdrive, but managers’ inability to efficiently organize knowledge work appears to be a long-standing open problem.
[+] [-] cratermoon|4 years ago|reply
The hive mind arises because instead of having 1 or two people handle things like coordinating a meeting, everyone involved has to coordinate with everyone else.
> Rather than strategic thinkers, managers work as human switchboards, answering and forwarding dozens of emails on any and every topic to keep the system from seizing up.
You could take out "email" and replace it with "slack threads" or "text messages", or just about any other tech, and you'd still have the same problem: there's no sane organization any more, just a bunch of people running around trying to connect and work with each other.
[+] [-] hudsonjr|4 years ago|reply
I know I try to create ways of automating or semi-automating things to not be in e-mail or slack. The problem I have is that people just direct their reports to e-mail me or @me in slack. I think that's likely because of the "hyperactive hivemind" where that's the quickest way for them to move a task on.
Likewise I see the problem he mentions where people half-ass an e-mail just to move it out of their inbox. I have to fight not to do that myself and it's usually when someone wants "one thing", but that one thing is actually 3+ high level things with other sub-tasks that need to be accomplished.
[+] [-] malshe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planet-and-halo|4 years ago|reply
Another HN thread recently linked the essay "Meditations on Moloch," which among other things talks about multi-polar traps, things like the prisoner's dilemma in which the players are incentivized to defect. I never thought of the email problem this way, but it definitely feels right now that I think about it.
I'm privileged to work somewhere where my bosses specifically tell me to turn off my email and just pair program with someone, but honestly I still leave my chats up and allow myself to be constantly diverted. I've clearly internalized this way of working and the fear of being "rude" or whatever by not instantaneously responding to the point where it's the natural way I work. This is in spite of the fact that it's something I work to break out of.
[+] [-] annoyingnoob|4 years ago|reply
People think I'm nuts when I bring up a 6 hour work day. I do my best work in 6 hours, the rest isn't my best even if I'm still productive. Things I do during my personal time are part of what I bring to the table. When work takes away from fulfillment outside of work then I have less to offer.
[+] [-] mastazi|4 years ago|reply
If you want to change the rules of communication in the workplace, sure let's have a discussion. But that doesn't have anything to do with email vs. some other tool.
If you think the problem is some protocol (as in email protocol) or some client[1]... Then my BS detector will go off.
[1] I recognise that some email clients are better than others. It should also be noted that email is one of the few communication modes where you are free to choose whatever client you want, so thee argument "email is bad because Client X is bad" doesn't really hold.
[+] [-] ahussain|4 years ago|reply
99% of things are not urgent, and people should not be expected to be available instantaneously. But implementing that requires discipline on the part of the person sending the message.
[+] [-] lowercase1|4 years ago|reply
If I need library PR approved so I can make a service 1 PR so I can make a production release request so that I can deploy a one line change then it's hard to get things done with 4 hour ping time.
[+] [-] ShroudedNight|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamweld|4 years ago|reply
https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate
[+] [-] Orou|4 years ago|reply
I've very much felt this pain in a few of my roles. I understand the need for this sort of many-hats-wearing, elbow-greased approach to solving business problems in a startup. But it's infuriating working in late-stage startups (or even mid-sized tech companies) that fail to get away from this 'throw people at the problem' mentality and spend the time and resources to explicitly define what the business' core processes are and how they work.
I know not everyone thinks about problems in terms of process flows, but it still drives me crazy!
[+] [-] jkhdigital|4 years ago|reply
Even with well-defined processes, poor instrumentation for revealing the true scale of the backlog at each stage can lead to this “always firefighting” mode of operation.
[+] [-] lazyant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwb|4 years ago|reply
I can email anyone in the world, that is mind blowing. I've gotten amazing responses from authors whose books I love, people I admire, old friends I lost contact with and found, etc...
[+] [-] foolinaround|4 years ago|reply
In my dream setup, there are 2 kinds of emails, and the onus is set by the sender of the email.
1) The priority email - in which the sender expects a single person receiver to act on specific aspects, as soon as the receiver is able to.
The receiver gets the email asap, and because he receives less emails, he can address it. Like a hot potato, if there is more info he needs, he can pass it around the same way.
Everyone else is on cc or bcc - and these folks get it delivered to them as #2 below.
This email has only 1 person in the 'To' field, and if there are many, then the system makes it so that everyone in the 'To' field get the email as #2 below.
2) The FYI email - this email is sent by the sender, but is kept in a safe place till the receiver pulls for it.
The sender is made aware that the receiver has pulled for it or not, and if the sender is not satisfied with the speed of response, this email can be upgraded into #1.
---
I think this does not change too much of the systems, just small tweaks to workflow, and is something that can be achieved if the team puts their mind to it.
[+] [-] molsongolden|4 years ago|reply
Teams collaborate on a shared inbox but Rules can route emails so they only show up in one individual’s inbox. With this setup, everyone else can still text or tag search and find the email but it’s only in the inbox of the person it is assigned to. If you are the lead for a given project then you’ll receive the client emails in your inbox but the rest of your team in To: or CC: will not. If you used to be the lead for something, handed it off months ago, and the client continues to include you on emails, you won’t see those emails because they’ll be assigned to the current lead.
[1] https://front.com/
edit: I guess this is still missing the sender intent component. A similar setup to what I mentioned above could be created for a single gmail inbox using rules and folders but the system falls apart without the sender being in on it.
[+] [-] Cerium|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neatze|4 years ago|reply
Simply don't understand this, I am not person with great writing skills, but I prefer email most of the time, because to me it is more concise communication medium without time pressure, when it is up to me, usually my work pattern is like this ( emails -> chart -> may be meeting ) or ( emails -> meeting(s) ).
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
I long for the days when email was the only medium of electronic communication. Now it's email, Slack, Basecamp, Teams, Jira and Zoom.
[+] [-] h_alpha|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GianFabien|4 years ago|reply
Personally, I don't even have email running all day. I just start the mail client about an hour before I am leaving the office, answer the important emails, delete or forward most others. And I get lots of work done!
[+] [-] o5ira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman3|4 years ago|reply
Anyone have any experience to back that up?