Last week we shared a great article by Rosscott called “The Problem With Email”. Besides some great visuals—including the wonderfully named “The Cycle of (Time) Suck”—the article offers some fantastic insights into several different but related problems with email.
Problem #1: Mission Creep
“Now, e-mail is considered instantaneous[…] [A]s more and more devices allow us to keep an eye on things, people have begun to think of mail as more of a tool of instant message than that of a thoughtful missive.”
“Mission creep” is a term taken from the military, describing the slow and unintended deviation from a mission’s early objectives, often leading to uncertain goals, longer deployments, and negative consequences.
I think it pretty neatly sums up one of the problems with email. For too long, email was the only game in town when it came to written, digital communication. So what started as thoughtful, substantive missives exchanged electronically devolved into short bursts of text and endless chains of one-sentence messages.
Even though there are now a plethora of options better-suited to this kind of communicating (text, social media, apps like Slack), it still clutters to much of our email.
Problem #2: Bad Communication is Medium-Agnostic
“We enter into a paradox with mail. The longer the mail, the easier it may have been handled in a conversation. The more conversations, the more you wish it could’ve just been handled in e-mail […].”
“Ugh! Cell phones are the worst!” “I swear, I’m quitting Facebook!” “I HATE EMAIL!” Do any of these sound familiar? If so, it’s because they point to a very natural experience that relates to a big problem with our email experience.
When we suffer from the ill effects of crappy communication, it’s natural to blame the medium. And sometimes the medium really is at fault: lousy cell reception, for example. But often, we are actually mad not at the form, but the content.
In other words: bad communication is bad communication. If you are trapped in an endless slog of back-and-forth chain emails about some project, would it really be any better if you were trapped in an endless meeting about the same thing? When we communicate with our colleagues, it is important to do so in an efficient, effective way, regardless of the medium. Or as Rosscott puts it:
“Maybe […] we could stop using so many ways to communicate and instead think more about communicating.”
Problem #3: The Availability Trap
“The problem these days lies in our ability to always be available. Maybe waiting a little bit longer wouldn’t be so bad…”
We’ve written quite a bit about the “Automatic ASAP” culture of the email status quo, so I won’t go on and on here, but this is absolutely right. Once there is a general understanding that messages can be answered nigh-instantaneously, there is an expectation that they should be. This introduces unnecessary stress and tension into our lives, not to mention a bunch of half-thought placeholder emails that clutter inboxes and outboxes alike just so we “get credit” for having responded immediately.
SOLUTION: The Magic of Clear Expectations
“If you want an actual take-away from this conversation, it’s setting your boundaries and expectations clearly.”
Amen, brother. The above sentence does a pretty good job of summing up Timyo’s mission statement. By letting people know when you are expecting a reply, you replace the pressure and stress of “Automatic ASAP” with productivity and peace of mind.
By actually considering when (or if) you need a reply on a specific email, you improve the level of communication in your workplace, and this kind of consideration is contagious. It, too, is “medium-agnostic.”
Timyo is designed to bring email back in line with it’s original objectives By helping users send expectations clearly and easily, Timyo does away with email “mission creep”, focusing instead on what email was born to be: an ideal tool for formal and/or substantive asynchronous communication.
It’s very true that email has problems, and pointing them out is incredibly important. The good news is that, we are addressing those problems, and the better news is that we have solutions.
