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Is Email = Efail?
Wednesday December 03, 2008

Coding Horror blog comes up with some fun stuff on a regular basis, Is Email = Efail? is a good one,

What we can to combat the email = efail problem? Take Tantek's advice: whenever possible, avoid sending email. Not because we don't want to communicate with our peers. Quite the contrary. We should avoid sending email out of a deep respect for our peers -- so that they are free to communicate as effectively and as often as possible with us.

Channel that private email effort into a public outlet. Discussion boards, blog entries, comments, wikis, you name it. If it can be indexed by a web search engine, you're in the right place -- and many more people can potentially find, answer, and benefit from that information.
If you must send email, make it as short as possible. Think of it as Strunk and White on speed. Can you reduce your email into a single paragraph? How about two sentences? How about just the title field with no body, even?
Remember the theory of communication escalation. Email is just one communication tool in our toolkit; that doesn't mean it is always the right one for whatever situation is at hand. Take advantage of phone calls, instant messaging, text messages, and so forth, as appropriate. Scale your choice of communication method to the type of conversation you're having, and don't be afraid to escalate it (or demote it!) as the ebb and flow of the conversation shifts.

So if you've emailed me, and I haven't responded in a timely fashion, I apologize. I know it may sound crazy, but I've been desperately clawing my way out from under this mountain of pebbles.

Although I don't totally subscribe to what he says, my volume of e-mail is definitely really high.

I don't delete a lot of my work e-mail as I use it to search for information and decisions made. I have over 12K e-mails just for this year alone, that I have kept. I am still working out how to organize them all, as searching these can work, but it can get tricky to get the right search incantation. I now have an Info inbox in which I place e-mails I have searched for and found the exact information I needed, a kind of history of successful searches.

I have sent over 14K e-mails since Oct 2005. The last time I did the math, it was something like 12 e-mails/day 7 days/week, WOW!!!

After reading Is Email = Efail?, I decided to try and reduce the volume I send out by blogging more and see how that works out.

(2008-12-03 12:12:06.0) Permalink Comments [0]

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