Reflections on a night at BayCHI: BayCHITalk
I had the opportunity at BayCHI to re-experience Merlin Mann's (of
http://www.43folders.com fame) view of all things Productivity, in
particular the problem that's become a cliche of modern life: Email
Overload. His unapologetic characterization of the great majority
of email
we receive as the effluent of information work got me thinking
about the
converse of the problem:
___Why are we NOT more mindful about the email that we send?___
Well, for one thing, email is by it's nature ephemeral. Modeled on
snail
mail, email communication is structured as discrete messages that are
composed, sent and for the most part discarded (by both senders and
receivers) except for occasional dives into our email repositories
for
select pieces of information. (Although not typical of data-happy
information geeks, there are a lot of people who literally DELETE,
not
archive, all their email...OR worse, email you again and again for
the same
information. In the last year, I have been asked for and provided
my home
mailing address to my parents at least 6 times.)
___Why are emails discarded? (Out of sight, out of mind)___
For most people on most email clients...email is not editable. As
a result,
any one email can't evolve with you as you make progress on a
problem. It's
a snapshot of a piece of information, at a given moment in time.
Often times
by the time an email is received and read by the intended
recipient, that
piece of information has already become obsolete. (Ever make the
mistake of
replying to email in a thread "in the order you received it"?)
Email as it
turns out is a great conveyance for dumping information straight
into the
archive.
The email communication is given priority over the "information item"
transported by the email. How so?
Just look in your Inbox. Some emails are tasks. Some are reading
material.
Some are event invitations. Some are documents, drafts of proposals,
questions, discussions. How do you know this? You look at each
individual
email and figure it out. But after you figure it out, you have no
way of
recording what you just figured out. As a result, there is nothing
on the
"outside" of the email that helps you figure that information out:
e.g. A
task icon. Reading glasses. Question mark. Talk bubble for
discussions.
Instead, we're provided with generic tools like Flags and Color
codes to add
Semantics to information. Was the Red flag for "Proposals I need
to review"
or was that Green? Which begs the question, am I using the right
tool? Why
is color appropriate for visually communicating something as
complex as
Proposals versus Tasks? Would we ever use that in our verbal
communications
with each other? "Well I've got 3 Reds and 1 Green to tackle this
week." It
sounds like Pentagon obfuscation. Even if you had the memory power
and
discipline to institute this system for yourself, how would you
share it
with others?
In the end, your email client is dumb and makes you dumb along
with it. All
it knows is that you have emails with different colored flags.
Anything
beyond that and you're on your own.
___The Art of Addressing emails___
The lack of meaningful semantics is most egregious in the
Addressing fields,
which is where I think most of us go wrong when composing emails.
The fields
we're offered are for the most part, too generic: To, CC, BCC.
What is TO? Isn't this email technically TO everyone? Out of all
the mail
you receive, how many people do you feel take great care in how
they address
their emails?
However, if the "information item" emerges into the forefront of the
communication workflow (aka Stamping in Chandler: This is Task,
this is a
Meeting invite, this is a Proposal), context-specific semantics
can help ask
the right questions.
INVITE: Who are you Invite-ing to this meeting?
FYI: Who just needs to know about it?
ASSIGNED TO: Who are you asking to complete this task?
QUESTION FOR: Who are asking for input from?
FYI: Who just needs to know about it?
I'm not proposing that we change the email protocol. What I'm
describing is
purely smoke and mirrors that information management clients need
to pull
off in order to help users be more mindful about how they utilize
incredibly
generic
On the receiving end, the client needs to be able to parse these
semantics
and present them to the recipient in order to help them pick out
signals
from the sea of noise. "This is something that's Assigned to me."
"Oh look,
someone's asking me a question." "All this other stuff is just
chatter and
FYIs." Instead, all we have today in email clients is the "Danger,
Will
Robinson" flag called "High Priority." And there are only so many
times
Chicken Little can squawk about the sky falling before we become
immune to
such stuff. "High Priority" has no texture, no nuance. "High
Priority" for
whom? in what context? in what way? (There's also the little
problem that
just because something is High Priority for YOU...doesn't mean
it's high
priority for ME.)
However, IF we could have texture, nuance and subtlety in our
communications, courtesy of richer user semantics, then perhaps: The
"information we email" would become more than just one-off blobs
of text we
lob into other people's Inboxes and the Inbox could stop being
where people
catch up with yesterday's news, which is a waste of effort for
both the
sender and the receiver.
Instead, the "information we email" can become the "data
representation" of
the problems and issues that we're tracking in our heads. And like
the stuff
that floats around in our head, the tasks, drafts, discussions and
issues in
our information managers will evolve and change as "new
information about
our information" (meta-data) come to light. "This task needs to be
due when?
It's a good thing you told me."
Practically speaking, it means that rather than having 8 separate
emails,
all of which are really just "Oh I forgots" and addendums to the
original
email, you have a single "information item" that everyone can edit
and
update, that is a LIVING record of the progress that you make on it.
That's when "email" as a technology will become something helps
you keep
track of information, rather than something you lose track of.
