Why Email Belongs in Your Toolbox

Email Belongs in Your Toolbox

On the first day of an acting class I took in college, one of my classmates asked our teacher what “school” we would be learning. The Method, like little Bancrofts and Brandos? Or maybe the Meisner technique, repeating our lines to each other over and over until they lost all meaning?

My teacher shook his head. “If I were teaching you to be a mechanic,” he said, “I wouldn’t only teach you how to use a wrench and then say ‘go and tell people you’re a Wrench mechanic.’ What good would that be? Sometimes a wrench is useful; sometimes it isn’t.

So I wouldn’t want you to go out into the world and tell people ‘I’m a Method actor’, either. Techniques are tools. A mechanic needs to learn how to use a variety of tools and then find the one best-suited for each specific job. That’s exactly what the actor should do, too.”

I was reminded of this last week, when I read John Pavlus’ great article over at Fast Company Design: “How Email Became the Most Reviled Communication Experience Ever”. It’s a thoughtful and thorough piece on what is wrong with email in 2015, and what can be done about it.

The part that made me remember my old acting teacher is a quote from Stewart Butterfield, the cofounder of Slack, a powerful team management tool that has taken off over the past year:

“I spend four or five hours a day on email[…] Its virtue is that it crosses organizational boundaries, it’s the lowest common denominator, it’s the lingua franca of computer-mediated communication. It’s how we set up this conversation.”

I think that Butterfield’s quote, and the article in general, get at a foundational part of the ethos here at Timyo: rather than try to make email the best tool for every situation, we want to take what email is already good at and make it even better. We don’t think email needs to be your go-to choice for discussing an in-house project with your team (something that Slack is great at). For that matter, we also don’t think that email should be able to make you a fantastic omelette.

But there are a ton of situations in which email is the best fit, and for those we think Timyo makes it even better. Email allows for communication that is a)more formal, b)asynchronous (meaning you can send an email at any time without needing to sync up with the recipient, as you do with phone calls, texts, and chat services), and c)capable of elaboration and depth, i.e. you can lay out thoughts clearly and more deeply than you can with other communication that prizes speed and brevity. 

In short, we believe that email is the perfect tool for a lot of business communication. And by allowing you to clearly set expectations and prioritize emails by time, Timyo optimizes your email when you do use it.

To extend my acting teacher’s analogy, Timyo doesn’t want you to be ‘a Wrench mechanic’, but when you do reach for the wrench because it’s the right tool for the job, we want to make sure that it’s the best wrench possible.

Just please be sure and put us back in the toolbox when you are done…We would hate to get rusty.

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