… a lot of people simply don’t reply to emails/messages these days any more. I get that emails can be exhausting at times, but really, I am answering any email I get. Sometimes late, but I answer.
The reason for this is that I always try to imagine myself. Not getting an answer leaves you with questions like “Did the message arrive or did it end up in spam?”, “Did I say something wrong and upset her/him?”.
There’s no law that you have to, but if you’re shooting for success of any kind, just not answering is almost never going to be part of the path there.
I can remember specific no-reply emails I’ve sent and and thought, oh well, wouldn’t wanna work with them on anything. It’s similar to dating: if that’s how they treat people, it’s probably a dodged bullet.
For at least the last fifteen years I’ve kept an inbox close to zero. Currently I’m sitting at the supposedly magical number.
I like it that way.
But sometimes a few emails also start to linger. I like to think of them as festering.
I’m not clear on what action to take, not clear on the steps required, and tend to stare at the emails dozens of times until I come to some resolution.
Who will be reading this email? What do they want of me? What do I want of them? Who are they? What do they know about me? What do they know about the topics of which I am writing? How can I read the room, so to speak?
Say the person who you’re writing an email to is holding a metaphorical knife. A knife that severs your job. Severs your ability to provide for yourself and family. And you know nothing about this person. They are entirely anonymous and the best you can tell they know nothing about you, your job, the circumstances, or anything at all that would help you craft this email.
Could you write this email? Could you write it well?
Email has been in the news a bit lately, in just this context. Like:
It’s not entirely cut and dry. Most of us, I’d wager, are in favor of efficiency. Particularly in government, where we want processes to work cleanly for us. And we want our tax money to feel like it’s being used well.
So some sort of way to measure and improve that efficiency seems more than fair.
And what about an efficient way to measure that efficiency? Also good? Perhaps an email just asking people what they are doing is smart. Seems like a pretty easy task. If you can’t do that, maybe it really is a sign you aren’t particularly effective in your job.
But I’m not sure that’s fair.
Email, like any other form of communication, requires this empathy on both sides.
This isn’t a surprise to those federal workers. Apparently this is the second of such requests recently. When your job is at risk, you know about it. They are biting their fingernails already.
An anonymous person holding a knife at you is asking these questions. Not your boss, not your boss’ boss, no someone who is clued in from anywhere near the organization.
What if your federal job doesn’t involve being in front of a computer much at all and you missed it?
What if you’re amazing at your job but you aren’t particularly good at writing?
What if you’ve recently broken both of your arms and are on leave or are doing something else constructive at work aside from computer work?
What if you did a lot at work but it’s really niche and complicated and requires nuance and context to understand, so explaining in 5 bullet points will sound like gibberish?
Jobs tend to be pretty niche. Ask a random federal worker exactly what their day to day job is it’s probably not “chop carrots and bread chicken filets” it’s probably more like “I work for the VA doing project management on the computer system for processing claims. Part of it is in legacy MUMPs and it needs to stay that way as we don’t have the budget or staff to re-write it, but it does need to continue working so that claims are processed for our nations vets. There was a bug with leap years that resulting in the wrong date on some forms. That’s one of 45 things I’ve worked on this year.”
So it requires empathy on the side of the (guy holding knife) that is reading these emails (lol). And it requires empathy on the side of the threatened employee writing these emails. They need to take a wild guess at who is doing that reading and evaluating the emails and write toward them, which will be mistargeted at best.
Again all this isn’t entirely cut and dry. I do think it’s a reasonable ask for employees to be accountable and productive. I also think it’s reasonable to question the methods for determining this.
Perhaps the most time I personally spend on email is staring at lingering emails. I bet I average about 5 of them at any given time. Emails that are just sitting there and I know they need some kind of action or response, I just can’t get it done for whatever reason. Maybe I don’t know what to say yet. Maybe I just can’t spend the time right now on what it needs.
It’s not all bad. Maybe letting it sit there and having my brain re-visit it periodically is what it needs for the right answer to be come to. But then there comes a point where I just can’t look at it anymore. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t anymore. Maybe I start to resent it or something. There definitely is a breaking point though, where I literally think “Done. This needs to be gone.”
At that point, I either force myself to deal with it or move what needs to be done somewhere else, like a TODO list. In rare cases I just delete it.
This of course makes me wonder if I should constantly be clearing out the inbox before I start to resent emails, inbox zero style. But I’ve had that thought many times and have never moved on it. Again, like I said, I think forcing my brain to revisit the email many times over and over is what it takes to deal with it.
If it’s sincere, heck yes. Directly reaching out to someone to tell them something or ask them something without it being overly self-serving is wonderful. It’s human. It’s fun. Email is just one way to do it, but it’s a good one because it’s fast, free, and you do it from your comfiest chair.
People screw up email. BCC is confusing. People can feel overwhelmed by email. Email isn’t as evolved and friendly as some more modern forms of digital communication.
I’m slightly surprised Terence Eden is opposed to email in general (for the reasons above, to name a few). I’ve read his blog a long time and seems to generally favor long-standing reliable tech. But hey, it’s not like I don’t see the warts.
Perhaps we’re on the cusp of obliterating email? Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline?
There are, I’ll admit, some advantages to email. The most prominent being that the receiver can permanently store a copy. Notwithstanding inept attempts to recall an email (which often highlights its sensitivity) an email delivered is an email stored. That is undoubtedly useful for the recipient.
But it is hard to escape the conclusion that email is an analogue process in a digital world.
Replace it with what? is my main pushback every time this comes up. How does my cable internet company get in touch with me? What do I tell someone I met at a conference how to get in touch with me? How can I provide a general generic way to communicate with me? What can be the root-level authentication method for other services for me?
I don’t want to give people my phone number, it’s too personal, too immediate, too abrupt. I don’t want to tell them to join a Discord group that I happen to also be in, that’s signing them up for a world of communication they may have no desire to have. I’m not giving them my address to send a letter, too dangerous, too slow. We need a very generic, very global, very interoperable communication system and we literally have it.
It’s not that hard and it’s not that bad. I think people can come to actually like it.
I’ve long used manual mail rules to label and sort inbound messages into different folders.
My mail provider (Proton) supports both folders and labels, with mail rules limited by the constraints of their encrypted email implementation. I used rules heavily, limits aside, to add labels for context, mark low priority as read and file it into folders and — in some cases — do both.
The problem with this though and the problem with segmented inboxes is that it multiples the number of inboxes you have to check.
While I build these tools, I just don’t see many services built on the back of email as an interface. Friendfeed was one of the first services that I vividly remember letting you perform actions via email and Google App Engine also had an inbound email handler (long-since deprecated), there are perilously few services that I can find that are built off the back of this communication modality.
I would guess we don’t see email services productized as much as:
It’s taken as a given. The service does a thing and if output is a part of it, email is just one of the places it can go, not the ONE place it can go.
People don’t like email anymore, so even if it would be useful, paying to get more of it doesn’t feel good to them.
A recent example though I can think of is Sill, which is awesome. It does digests of social media activity. But I admit, I consume it through the RSS output not the Email output, which feels better to me.
This is just one example of many email conversations I have every week with people who read my blog, or when I’ve read a post on someone else’s blog and emailed them. I think it shows the power of adding a simple “email me” button to the end of one’s posts, and why I think that this is far better than a commenting system.
If Herman had a commenting system on his blog, I don’t think I would have reached out – it feels too impersonal to me.
Kev’s “call to action” as it were is not subtle:
Every few years there is a little round of enthusiasm for this approach to blog reader engagement, and I’m all about it.
My personal style at the moment is much more understated.
And I also have a commenting system, which forces people to choose then how to engage. I’m sure Kev gets a lot more emails with that big ass button!
I also suspect the personal connection that comes over via email is much deeper and valuable.
