Ordinary Gweilo

John Naughton in The Observer on an old favourite:

‘You can’, my mother used to say, ‘have too much of a good thing’. Since she was generally not in favour of good things (which she equated with self-indulgence), I habitually disregarded this advice. But I am now beginning to wonder if she may have been right after all.

This thought is sparked by an inspection of my email system. I have 852 messages in my ‘office’ inbox. Correction, make that 854: two more came in while I was typing that last sentence. My personal inbox has 1,304 messages.

My spam-blocking service tells me that, in the past 30 days, I received no fewer than 3,920 invitations to: enhance my, er, physique; invest in dodgy shares; send money to the deserving widows of Nigerian dictators; and purchase Viagra. I am – literally – drowning in email.

Well, not literally, of course.

If I took it seriously, I could spend all day dealing with my email and never do any actual work. Which is why, increasingly, I tend to ignore my inboxes. This may seem discourteous, but in fact it isn’t – because much of ‘my’ email isn’t actually aimed primarily at me at all. I am just one of the people who is cc’d on the correspondence. In other words, people who are communicating with one another have added me as a kind of bystander. Their motives for doing this are varied. In some cases they are doing me a courtesy, or trying to persuade me that they’re not doing things behind my back. (Little do they know that I couldn’t care less.) In other cases, they are simply being lazy or covering their arses in case anything goes wrong, at which point they will say that I was ‘kept in the loop’ and accordingly must share some of the blame.

Yes, but I think it’s more complex than that.  Most people tend to copy their emails too widely, but that’s because it’s often easier to do that than to figure out whether each person might need (or want) to know what is going on.   

The problem is not with email as such, but with the way organisations have subverted – or perverted – it for bureaucratic purposes. And they have done it for the same reason that spammers have perverted personal email: because it’s cheap and easy to do. In the old days, big organisations had massive internal mail systems, with post-rooms and messengers lugging bags or trolleys of paper. Email offered a way of dispensing with all this bother and expense. So organisations began to deluge employees with electronic documents. And the flood of email rapidly became the torrent that paralyses us today. Email has morphed from a communication channel into a means of bureaucratic control.

Well, up to a point – I agree that most organizations haven’t bothered to think through the way they use email, but there is also an obvious deficiency in most email software – the subject line is rarely enough to tell the recipient what they need to do with an email (and many people don’t even to make the subject meaningful or change it when the conversation develops). 

It seems to me that what we need is a more structured approach so that you have to specify both a category (e.g, customer, project, etc.) and the action required by each recipient – and if it is just for information then it could be filed in the correct folder and never go into the recipient’s inbox.  

Of course this would also require users of email to be more disciplined and to think before sending a message.  Which has to be a good thing – currently it’s just too easy to fire off an email to dozens of people, and the result is that many people either ignore most of they emails they receive, or waste far too much time processing them.