What’s Wrong with Email?
Email isn’t really broken,
it’s just misunderstood and often forced to operate outside its
domain of competence. It’s the original (and still most
effective) push technology. If Bob wants Ellen to review
july98.xls, it’s appropriate that he email
her a copy, just as in the pre-electronic era he would have dropped a
paper copy on her desk with a yellow sticky note requesting her
attention.
Unfortunately things are never quite so simple. At the same time that
Ellen needs to review the numbers, Richard wants to spruce up the
spreadsheet’s appearance. So Bob cc’s
july98.xls to Richard as well. Now when Ellen
replies to Bob with a financial clarification, Richard gets an
unnecessary and distracting email. Likewise when Richard replies to
Bob, Ellen gets junk mail.
Things deteriorate from here. Bob and Ellen begin a dialogue that generates a series of back-and-forth messages, each containing an ever-more-confusing tail of quoted responses. Along the way they recruit George and Susan, by cc’ing them some version of the evolving discussion. George and Susan struggle to get up to speed. They don’t have the entire transcript, which is distributed between Bob’s mailbox and Ellen’s, so they have to read between the lines in order to join the discussion midstream. Meanwhile all these messages keep hitting Richard’s mailbox. As a member of the team, Richard should be at least peripherally aware of these goings on. But this chatter should be confined to a lower-priority ...