The Email Heresy

Let’s just say it. Email isn’t working. In fact its got to the point where ‘not working’ doesn’t describe the problem anymore. Email has moved beyond not working, it has become anti-work.

Technology often benefits from Network Effects, a phenomenon where something becomes more useful the more people adopt it. Telephones are a good example. Two people with phones works okay, but three is better, and three billion is wonderful. Email looks to fit this pattern, but the reality is somewhat different. Looking back at two decades of email use I think that there was a sweet and selfish spot (probably in the late 1990s) where I sent a lot of emails but other people didn’t. It was a fabulous time in which I became more productive and communication was slick and efficient. Sure, I was probably a massive pain in the arse to my snail-mail and memo-sending friends and colleagues, but by God I got things done.

Those days are long gone.

Now everyone has email, and they’re not afraid to use it. In the last four months I received 7517 emails – and that doesn’t include spam or notification emails (from sites like Twitter and Facebook). That’s 7.5 thousand bona-fide read-me-I’m-from-a-person emails (and throughout this article that’s all I will count). That’s around 60 emails every day including weekends.

I have an email archive that goes back ten years. It has over 100,000 emails in it. I am not unusual. This is not an exceptional figure.

Looking back over the last ten years it is clear that things are getting steadily worse (see depressing Figure 1). With one exception: 2010, a year when I was off work for several months, I have got more email year on year. In 2003 I got 1464 emails all year. In 2012 I got 1523 emails during December alone (including a two-week Xmas break). That’s completely mad.

Depressing Figure 1: Received Emails 2003 – 2012

So what to do? I have tried a number of strategies to stay on top of it all. For a while I sorted my email into folders, but by the mid-2000s this had become untenable. I switched for several years to using unread email as an informal todo list, but this overwhelmed me – there is only so long you can look at an inbox with hundreds of unread emails all screaming for attention. In 2009 I adopted a proper one-touch policy and a Getting Things Done (GTD) system, with some custom scripts on hotkeys to copy emails into Things, a popular Mac ToDo application. GTD has served me well, I have got a lot of things ToDone and I’ve coped with the last 60,000 emails pretty well. Perhaps too well.

This last year, as my yearly email total breached 17,000, I realised that while I was generally getting through and dealing with my emails I was spending a huge amount of time doing it. A HUGE amount of time – perhaps half of my working week. And I realised a fundamental truth: many of these emails may represent real work, with real things that are worth doing, but they also mostly represent things that other people want me to do. Other people who find it to easy to send a question, make a request, or ask for something to be done.

And it’s a two-edged sword.

I don’t have quite such extensive records for my own sent email, my sent archive only goes back to 2008, but it’s still miserable – rising from 2400 sent emails in 2008, to 3300 in 2012 (see depressing Figure 2). That’s 15005 emails sent over a five-year period. Or around 13 emails every working day, 13 packets of distraction and misery every day for five years. I have realised that I may not be the worst email abuser, but I am undoubtably part of the problem.

Depressing Figure 2: Sent Emails 2008 – 2012

So I have been searching for an answer, and this Christmas Twitter gave it to me. Over Christmas I didn’t check Twitter that much, I checked it only a few times, reading only a random sample of the hundreds of tweets from the people I followed. And you know what? They didn’t care.

Twitter is a stream, a flow of information that you are not expected to read, or even to receive, but something that can be dipped into and out of as your life dictates. Sometimes, stuck in a boring seminar, or waiting for whatever, I am glued to Twitter, reading every precious tweet with gratitude – but more often than not I am a bit indifferent, glad of its amusement, trusting it to highlight interesting things or help create awareness of the lives of distant friends, but it is never needy, never bossy, never greedy.

What if email could be like that? What if email was not an inbox, but a stream?

Which leads me to my proposal, an experiment for 2013. This year my terrible pledge to all those sending me an email is simple:

I WILL NOT GUARANTEE TO READ YOUR MESSAGE

Pause for shock. Think it through. Breathe. Here it comes again. I no longer promise to read everything that is sent to me. I will miss things. I may not get that memo. I am not being rude, I am simply being realistic. So if your message is important, send it again. If you message is very important, phone me. But do not trust email – for it beggars us both.

Some part of me knows that what I am proposing is a 21st century heresy, because by acknowledging the email apocalypse in this way I am simultaneously pointing an accusing finger at you, whilst acknowledging my own inadequacy. For this I am truly sorry. As reparation I make three promises:

  1. I will never get upset if you send me a message more than once
  2. What applies to me, applies to you. I will never get upset if you do not read a message I send
  3. Whenever possible I will not send a message

That third one will be the hardest I think. Although I have some strategies: No one line acknowledgement emails, always reduce rather than expand cc lists, phone whenever possible, avoid lists. But even so.

I have been running this policy for a few weeks now, and it seems mostly to work. I skim read my email, and still see most things that matter. I have missed a few. The words ‘I did send you an email’ have been said to me a few times. Once it mattered, and I turned up unprepared for something that was worth preparing for, but it wasn’t the end of the world. These things seldom are. The end of the world doesn’t send emails.

In return I have discovered a new kind of freedom. Not from work – I still get asked to do things, and still willingly do them – but from the awful casual tyranny of the inbox. When I want, when I need to, I can switch off my email and do work that matters to me for a change.

I expect to do less. But also to do it better.

And I think that you will understand.