Wishing death might be too harsh. But, hear me out.
Let’s go back to how the email started. By the time I started working, emails had already become the primary mode of business communication. However, my assumption is that the email started in the day and age when work communication was primarily happening through letters, faxes, and telegrams. In the context of work, most of the conversation was extremely formal.
Over time, as things shifted to email, the act of sending these ‘letters’ became so much more easier (instant, no printing, no gluing the envelope and no posting). Naturally, as a result of this ease of sending letters and a simultaneous explosion of cheap phone calls and 24×7 texts, made emails – a replacement for formal letters – much more informal – and abundant.
Here are some of my assumptions and observations regarding email that I find frustrating:
- People are receiving more emails every day than ever before. The speed of work has increased and so has the amount of communication to humanely keep up with.
- As the boundaries between text and email keep blurring, there is no pressure to be formal and thoughtfully carve out the details, like one would have in a business letter.
- People end up creating multiple email threads about the same topic, disrupting the chain of conversations and the possibility of finding all the details about a particular task in one thread.
- We end up having unrelated subject lines to the email, making it harder to find. This can happen even with the best intentions.
The human faults are understandable but emails did not evolve to handle this – poor design.
In the work context, one thing remains common – all the emails we receive are about one of the following things:
- A task – to review a design, to submit a report, to send a file, etc.
- A meeting request – by job seekers, partners, team mates, marketers, etc.
- A marketing/sales pitch – someone trying to sell us something.
- Discussing an idea – this doesn’t happen frequently on email, but let’s consider this too.
Bottom Line – Each email directly translates to a task – an action item. It either needs scheduling or immediate actioning. Not that we don’t know this, but we don’t think about it the same way. At times we are able to action some items instantaneously, some high priority items might still get scheduled on a calendar but a lot of low to medium priority tasks might remain suspended. Not noted anywhere, sitting like dead weight at the back of our minds. We move on with our lives in hope that things won’t slip. Slip they do.
And, with 10000 things seeking our attention on a daily basis, I wish emails could help us have more control over our lives. I believe all this unorganised communication, not visible as a task, sits at the back of our head, making us feel we haven’t dealt with unquantifiable, un-prioritised work. If only, every email could land in front of us as a task-list – that we could prioritise – and feel more in control.
What are some of the broad features I would look for from such a system:
- Each new email should land in a general task list, from where I can assign it priority, specified to-do-lists, projects, etc.
- All eventual conversation related to a task should land under that particular task, for all the people part of that email. No more disjointed conversation threads for the same task.
- Instead of email forwards, more people can be simply pulled into being part of a task/project.
- All communication progresses as the task progresses, keeping things organised and actionable.
And not any task list – but one of those customisable workflow management systems on which teams can collaborate. It’s already happening to some extent – but only after you integrate a host of apps with your email and it might still not give you the kind of flexibility that you may seek. I am still waiting for someone to build an integrated email client that brings it all together. May be there already exists one such tool – and may be it is not required only by sales team, but by almost everyone.
So, may be, the email should not die. But I definitely think it’s high time the email starts adulting.