This is a series of posts about the challenges around email and thoughts around a true Inbox filter that shifts the onus from the receiver to the sender. If your job is busy work, or meetings, or not actually producing anything but instead just creating the illusion of work, then you can ignore the rest of these posts.
But for now, here are some more reasons why we need a better solution to e-mail:
- Many executives I work with (myself included) have meetings and other obligations that consume a majority of their work day, with about 3-4-5 hours of additional email every single day. That’s a pretty unsustainable 10-12 hour day to just deal with meetings and e-mail cruft, let alone trying to create anything, or grow as a person or professional. Dare I say that e-mail is creating less genius and more nonsense.
- If you want creative output, dare I say actual genius from people, you need to create an environment that fosters the three traits that Daniel Pink describes in Drive – Autonomy, Mastery & Sense of Purpose (Great RSA Animate link here). So you need to create an environment where people can think, often alone and uninterrupted. That means that they shouldn’t look at email for many hours. If you have an expectation of a faster reply (and your need is worth 20 minutes of their time, because of the cost of a context switch), then you should send them an instant message, but understand the tradeoffs. I don’t think developers work late because they are instinctively night-owls; they work late because they get uninterrupted time at off-hours and get addicted to the creativity that comes as a consequence of solitude.
- I’m very sensitive, as the boss, about not responding to email from my subordinates after hours. I don’t want to set an expectation that they have to respond with the same schedule/frequency as I. So if you are somebody in my organization, I may not be replying until work hours, because I don’t want you to feel compelled to respond back.
- Depending on the great work that people are involved with at the moment, they have a different PII – Peresonal Interruption Index. Having a variable PII is natural, but the problem is that if you set the precedent of having a low PII on some days (and reply quickly), they may come to expect it always.
OK, I could list a hundred more reasons, but let’s get on to a possible / fun / crazy solution… (next post, I’ll link to it here in a future edit.