The Email Status Quo is So Inappropriate

the email status quo

A Thought Experiment

Indulge me, if you will, in a thought experiment that will (I promise) lead to an insight into exactly what is wrong with the email status quo. For the purposes of this thought experiment, please assume that you have a) a home, b) a kitchen, c) some dirty dishes, d) a husband or wife, and e) some out-of-town friends named the Petersons, who are f) really just a lovely couple.

Supposition f) is not strictly essential for the success of this thought experiment, but you might as well treat yourself.

Now, imagine you are at home in the kitchen doing dishes and your husband or wife asks you where you were thinking of going to dinner on Saturday when the Petersons are in town.

Do you:

a) turn to him/her and say “How about Luigi’s? They love that place.”

b) drop the dish you’re currently doing (it breaks in the sink) grab your husband or wife by the shoulders and say “Oh my God! Get the kids! WE NEED TO FIGURE THIS OUT RIGHT NOW.”

c) finish doing the dishes, walk past your spouse, go get ready for bed, go to bed, get up in the morning, get ready for work, walk back into the kitchen where he/she is eating breakfast (oatmeal, which you think is gross but he/she loves) and say “I don’t know; how about Luigi’s?”

It’s clearly a), right? (If you picked b) or c), it’s never too early to find a good marriage counselor and/or divorce attorney). Because a) is the only answer that fits in terms of both content and form of communication.

In the case of b), the response is content-inappropriate: the situation at hand is not an emergency, and so shouldn’t be handled like one.

In the case of c), the response is form-inappropriate: when we ask a question face-to-face, we expect to be acknowledged almost immediately.

Both content-inappropriate and form-inappropriate responses are common to the email status quo, each for a couple of reasons.

Content-Inappropriate Responses

With content-inappropriate responses, a pervasive “always ASAP” culture has too often become the norm when it comes to email, with every email being treated as a burden that is best dealt with immediately. In addition, often the only way to flag an email as “important” is to mark it as “urgent”, when in reality these are two very different things. And the overuse of the “urgent” flag has led to an arms race—now if you don’t mark your email as urgent, it may be relegated to the bottom of the heap. I once worked with a client whose default setting on all emails was “urgent”, so every single email I received from him was marked with a “!”.

!This! !was! !very! !annoying!

Form-Inappropriate Responses

When it comes to form-inappropriateness, this didn’t used to be a problem, because, as with face-to-face communication, there were clear cues and expectations on when to respect a reply, based on the form of communication. If you sent a letter, you wouldn’t expect a response for several days at the least, because that is how long it would take for your letter and the response simply to be delivered. If you called someone on the phone, communication was immediate. If you had to leave a message, one or two days was a reasonable response time.

Today, however, our forms of communication have become muddled. Almost everything comes through our smartphone or laptop. An email (the descendant of sending letters) is delivered as quickly as a text or a phone call. Because of this, there is no built-in response time. And because so many of us have our phones and computers with us pretty much all-day everyday, there is an expectation that you’ve seen any communication pretty much whenever I sent it.

We’ve Lost the Thread. Timyo Helps You Find It.

Now that so much communicating comes through one device, we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between the different expectations that used to be automatically built in.

Timyo can help. It allows you as the sender to say exactly when you expect a reply, today, tomorrow, on a specific date, ASAP, or even that you aren’t expecting a reply at all. By giving the gift of clear expectations, you set up every interaction for success, eliminating any guesswork on the part of the recipient. This in turn allows them to send the kind of response you were looking for (i.e. if you requested a reply ASAP, you are probably not expecting a detailed 10-paragraph briefing), which in turn assures that you will be able to move forward productively and not waste time sending redundant follow-ups.

And being more productive means that you can do the most amount of work in the least amount of time, leaving you stress-free to enjoy those moments when you aren’t working—like Saturday night dinners at Luigi’s when the Petersons are in town.

May I recommend the veal parmigiana? I hear it’s just fantastic.

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