One of the things that is common to do with clubs/organizations is to distribute e-mail newsletters in this sort of form:
——————————
EYE OF SAURON NEWSLETTER
1) Saturday meeting: Trash talking and board elections
2) Sauron-con ’96 is here!
3) Concerns about membership dues
4) Membership rules change
——————————1) The Saturday meeting
Yup, that’s right, it’s time for ANNUAL ELECTIONS again!…
Now, this e-mail observes standard practice in e-mail etiquette. It has a well ordered table of contents; it organizes and divides elements so there is a clear distinction between each event; it includes an unsubscribe message at the end (trust me).
So why is this so bad?
1. The Undeletable E-mail
E-mail is the primary form of communication in many organizations, especially ones with members in far-flung locations. As a form of communication, e-mail is much like a phone conversation or meeting with someone in person–we convey ideas to each other and exchange knowledge so that we can work as a team.
Unlike e-mail, however, phone conversations and personal meetings don’t keep records of themselves. If we’re having a phone conversation, we may jot down a person’s name; in meetings, we may take minutes. Phone and in-person conversations are not forms of recording information–we handle that separately.
We rarely save actual phone or in-person conversations, and we rarely have the option. And perhaps this is a good thing–saving communication in its raw form may sound like a feature, but it’s really preserving the disorganization of the original communication.
Consider the e-mail we mentioned in the beginning. That e-mail was well-organized as a form of communication, but what if you were interested in just elections? That e-mail is now the de facto record of information for elections–you’d save that newsletter just for one piece of information out of four.
And what if you wanted to hold on to the rules change? Now the e-mail morphs into the dreaded “Undeletable E-mail.” Since it has only one or two items in it, you look at it almost every other day you check your e-mail, but you never get anywhere with it because you can’t delete it!
2. An Improper State
Is an e-mail message to proper way to record information? Obviously not–the best way would be to enter an event, for example, would be in your calendar. As it is, e-mail acts as a stand-in for all sorts of information–to do lists, contact information, website addresses–which all get stored in an amorphous blob that we call the “inbox.”
This is a poor state to keep things in. To understand why, let’s compare e-mail to its closest pre-internet counterpart–the answering machine.
Most people delete messages on their answering machine. [1] The idea behind an answering machine is simply to allow communication in a non simultaneous way–if you’re not home, you leave it on and call people back when you get home.
Can any of us imagine keeping several thousand messages on our answering machine? (All neatly ordered with labels and searchable by Google, of course.)
3. The Way It Should Be
E-mail was never meant to be used as a tool for storing information, and it’s only the result of an unfortunate accident that it is. The main problem is that we don’t have convenient ways of storing all the information that comes on e-mail. We can put certain things in our calendars, and we can add names to our address books, but as a matter of convenience e-mail is still the most accessible place to put everything, since it’s already there.
Many of the pieces of the solution are already being experimented with. Instead of using e-mail to describe events, we can schedule them online using something like Google Calendar or Kiko and send invites. We can also collaborate on documents online to keep track of notes.
Each of these things is only a part of a much wider solution. Since none of these new tools are as universal as e-mail, they can’t solve everyone’s problems–some things will just have to remain in the dreaded inbox.
4. At the Source
Interestingly enough, the latest systems of e-mail handling sometimes seem more designed to act as this record of information than the old fashioned dreaded inbox. Despite the informality of e-mail, it’s often possible for computers to find organization in these messages where humans might have to dig. Whenever GMail finds an address in your message, it offers to map it, as well as automatically attempting to find events and calendar them.
In today’s world, most of us read e-mails and have to file them manually. Filtering allows some of us to construct gadgets to avoid the task of management, but perhaps technology will soon help us all avoid that second step.
Interesting References
[1] 6 of 7 surveyed responded that their families delete messages on their answering machine. The 7th eventually answered my message and said their family “probably” deletes.
How You Handle Your Inbox Can Say a Lot About You
The inbox makeover (do-it-yourself filtering)
Email is not suitable for business use