There are those who profit off improving the software or approach to email and there are those who might profit by the decentralization of communications which ultimately makes email useless. Last year, Facebook completely rewrote their messaging system providing @Facebook email addresses to users and built in SMS capabilities alongside traditional Facebook messaging. Facebook’s COO stated at the launch, “If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she told a crowded conference hall, “you look at what teenagers are doing today.” She then predicted that email is “probably going away.”
Yeah, it makes complete sense to my teenage sisters that they don’t worry about their friend’s location on a map or phone number or email addresses. All that matters to them is that they can remember their friend’s name (sometimes only the first name) and then click “message” and that message goes to their friend’s Email account, phone and is pushed to the Facebook app on their phone. That works well because it centralizes all messaging into Facebook.There is no subject line, no header, no signature and no other features really aside from the ability to forward that message to a friend and attach a file.
“This is the future of messaging” is what many journalists are saying. Our generation will use Email for a while but the teenagers of today will see this as the best and only way to communicate. For now, you still need an email address to join Facebook but even that may change which will signal the first service to not require this and @Facebook.com is your identity online.
Scary stuff.
Gizmodo today:
Hellbent on keeping your digital life in order, you maintain that inbox. You reply, delete and file away every email until your unread message counter hits zero. Why are you doing that? It’s a waste of time.
Let your inbox run wild. Let it be the sprawling wad of chaos it wants to be. Let it fill up with tons and tons of unread emails like a patch of unruly weeds in the spring. Know why? You have a super-scythe called search that can clear through that mess with ease.
A recent study from IBM research confirms a belief I’ve maintained for years. Instead of organizing your inbox, it’s more efficient (not to mention EASIER), to leave your email in a state of chaos, and just use search to find what you need.
Says the guys at IBM who are hellbent on selling us an easy search tool to find things in our inboxes. It’s no secret that email is broken but it’s not email that’s broken, it’s us. This is like saying the postal service is broken. It’s not. The only thing off about the postal service is the time it takes to receive a letter and the price it costs to send it. The post hasn’t changed for hundreds of years.
Gizmodo adds:
And really, what does clearing out your inbox really accomplish? Does it give you a sense of achievement? Does it validate your reading skills? It’s organizing for organizing’s sake. At some point it was essential practice due to the limitations of past technologies. Now we do it out of unnecessary habit. Stop it.
Look, this doesn’t mean that a search bar has made email perfect. There’s still room for improvement. But any gains in efficiency won’t come from your micromanagement. It will come from reconceptualizing email from the ground up.
Google has already started with their priority inbox. All email is not equal, and it defnitely shouldn’t be presented as such. But why offload it into a separate folder? And why does it have to be 100% chronological?
Instead of priority inboxes, what about just having priority contacts? Email clients should take those contacts that it (and/or you) determine to be most important, and keep their unread emails at the top of your inbox, ordered according to importance/relevance (similar to what Facebook does with your feed). The rest of your read/unimportant emails would just fall under the priority batch, in chronological order.
Email shouldn’t be drastically changed.
We need to evolve how we use email.
It starts with you.
Shawn Blanc today:
I have turned into a bit of a poor correspondent. I do read all my incoming email. I get a lot of great feedback from you guys, and many of you send in links to things you’ve built or written. I love that stuff, it’s just that I’m not always able to respond back.
I feel like as I am still finding my rhythm as a full-time writer and blogger so I’ve been more or less ignoring most other things until I get the pace of my day settled. Then, I’ll add things back in — such as better email correspondence.
The screen grab he included has 324 unread emails and over 3,000 unread RSS items. I write far more than he does each week, I am a project manager at a very large company and still manage to shoot, edit and post 100-1,000 photos a week (higher when traveling. this week I shot 8,000 photos). I receive many emails a day, I don’t have a single unread notification in my Macintosh Dock before bed. My iPhone and iPad are badge free. I have nothing when I wake up and, for the 1st hour, I enjoy my morning as my Inbox is free and clear.
Why is everyone so “overwhelmed” with email and why is everyone “shouting” that email is broken?
I have an unread email in my Inbox right now and it’s an action item to print and sign something for work but I can’t complete that until I’m back in the America on Thursday. I attached that PDF to an Outlook appointment with a due date of Thursday and marked the email as read. In some cases, I’ll add it to OmniFocus or another task manager. I completely read every Instapaper article by Sunday night each and every week. I never have a single RSS item that hasn’t been read or sent to Instapaper before bed. If it wasn’t important to read today, I mark it as read because it’s just negligent to leave it in there.
I’m not crazy. I’m organized.
I really do not see what’s so hard. What I do see here is an error in the human experience and in the human habits and how we simply silo things and create more silos where it started as the shoe box or the physical Inbox and has now moved to Email, Twitter, RSS and other queues.
I don’t have any queues. I live in the now. Time shifting beyond a few days drives me crazy. Then again, I threw out all of my yearbooks, personal photos, memories and keep sakes when I moved to San Francisco. I give away my liquor and guns and I don’t save things like wine bottles or shirts that don’t fit. “Steve Wozniak gave me that shirt. Want it?” I don’t have a box of cables laying around and I don’t have any pens in my house at all because I never plan on ever using a pen again.
That’s how I live and I keep my computer in the same exact order.
I read reports on our world from individuals who report the entire story weeks after it has happened and I never tune into breaking news. The Zombie Apocalypse will happen and I’ll read about it a few days later if I’m still alive.
I prefer the timeless and not the now. I prefer to save something just as quickly as I am to throw it away if I’m not absolutely 100% in love with it.
Call it a character flaw if you will but I feel vindicated in this way of life and love living this way.
So, for that, Email is the exact same story. If you send me an email that’s not actionable, I read it and mark as read that moment. If it’s actionable but not right now, I file it for a later date. If it’s urgent, I minimize all windows, switch virtual desktops, go full screen in Word, Powerpoint or whatever and get it done right then. An email unread for more than 24 hours in my Inbox? Forget it.
I begin to withhold pleasurable activities from myself if I get behind on this workflow. If it’s Friday afternoon and I have tasks, emails and articles that are overdue and important enough to me and my colleagues to complete, I won’t have a beer that night, I’ll cancel plans with friends, I’ll lock myself indoors all weekend and get the job done.
*an email just came in from the truck rental place I was talking to. I minimized this to calculate miles and measure the chicken coop I bought and got back to him within 5 minutes. That’s prioritization and I can shift gears like that quickly when it comes to getting things done. Question, is $70 too much to pay for a day rate on a full size pick up truck?*
Back to my point, I restrict myself from life in order to make deadlines and get things done and, because I am absolutely in love with everything I choose to do in life (from work to play), there’s no qualms with getting things done. Anyone that’s dated me knows that photo editing comes before movie time but I don’t usually go beyond 6PM on my tasks because I do them efficiently and use my platforms wisely. I’m delegating and filing emails even while having lunch and before I head to the office. I subscribe to very few RSS feeds and never feel like I’m missing anything because many news sources link to the same things and, if an article is phenomenal, it’ll be linked to by a few blogs or friends on Twitter…and, of course it’s important to state that I only follow 169 people on Twitter.
Curation is key.
For those of you who can’t stay on top of email and consider that a chore, you should take lessons and read some books on this, but even then, you’re just piling more shit onto your shit process.
The key is rethinking how you live life. Divest yourself of all of the bullshit in your life, throw out the photographs, delete the contacts in your Address Book who don’t matter and go simple. I have friends who brag about 1200 Address Book contacts. My response, “I feel sorry for you. That sounds like a lot of work!”
So, that’s my advice. Change you life philosophy and way of life and you won’t have to bitch about email so much anymore. Email will be the least troublesome part of your life. I’ve never read a single book or post on email management. Email has been around for 20 years. I’m pretty sure we’ve all figured out how to use it by now. Well, I’d assume that much but obviously not.
This even goes for the guys who get 2,000+ emails a day…but, to you guys, you’re just bragging. Email traffic doesn’t mean you’re important. It just means you’re easy to email and have a lot of friends. It’s tough work being so popular. Start by removing all social media accounts from your email. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN should not equal an email. Have your iPad light up when you get a Facebook message or Tweet. You can glance over, gauge it’s importance and go back to work and it won’t pile up in your Inbox. Get a new email account and if you get a ton of press releases and don’t feel like unsubscribing, change accounts and make an auto-responder that says, “i changed my email address to… If you’re a company pitching me, reply to me on Twitter instead with your info. If you’re a friend, update your address book. If you’re an ex-GF, don’t bother”
Problem solved.
But really, it starts with trashing all of your yearbooks and photographs. They’re pointless. Digitize them to a zip folder on some random drive and throw them away. Life will be much better!