How We’re Working Isn’t Working
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In Message Not Received, I devote an entire chapter to the perils and limitations of email. This may leave potential readers with the impression that I despise email. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Hearing from a friend often puts a smile on my face. For someone like me, e-mail is a very valuable business tool. I’d even call it indispensable. Despite its limitations and the often-maddening insistence of so many people to ignore better collaboration tools, I for one could not work in a world without email.
Let me make this as clear as possible: The problem isn’t email. The problem is how we use it.
One could write a long book about the sentiment behind those two pithy sentences. By no means do they only apply only to email. In the technology world, there’s an oft-invoked axiom for this type of phenomenon: PICNIC. It stands for “problem in chair, not in computer.”
It’s easy to blame software applications for exacerbating business communication. For instance, Microsoft PowerPoint often takes a bad rap, but it’s a perfectly serviceable application. In fact, it is my presentation tool of choice. (I find its Presentation View to be exceptionally useful.) As much as we may like to criticize it, PowerPoint does not automatically generate dozens of inscrutable slides and force its users to read off of them. The problem lies in how people use it. Prezi, Keynote, and other presentation applications may offer different bells and whistles, but don’t change badly designed slides.
Email’s Cross-Purposes
We have long since solved email’s nascent problems: reliability, dependability, and interoperability. None of which alters the fact that email remains a fundamentally limited medium, and sending more messages only exacerbates its limitations. Most germane here, an increase in the number of emails often enhances the extent to which employees feel overwhelmed. Employees frequently use their inboxes as catchalls for absolutely everything work-related and even some non-work purposes. In doing so, they conflate several often overlapping but fundamentally disparate types of communications, including:
- Group work-related messages (read: announcements)
- Individual work-related messages
- New and existing work-related projects, issues, and tasks
- Comments to existing work-related projects, issues, and tasks
- Important personal communications—e.g., messages from significant others
We’ve been conditioned to use our inboxes as de facto to-do lists for our professional and personal lives. As such, it’s entirely rational for us to check in frequently, if not constantly. This goes double during deadlines if employees fear for their jobs. How else are employees supposed to answer essential questions like:
- What do I need to be doing right now?
- What else do I need to do?
- What’s the status of a current task, project, or issue?
- Does my team, manager, or subordinates need anything else from me?
- Are there any other problems of which I need to be aware?
- What else needs fixing?
- Is anything going on with my kids?
When we cram everything into email, it becomes less useful as a communications medium.
Phil Simon is an author, frequent keynote speaker and recognized technology expert.
