Death by Email, part 1

Large organizations almost always suffer from the problem of too much email.

For starters, it's rather likely that more than half the email one receives daily in a large company are bulk emails - announcements/internal advertisements & campaigns. And unlike the consumer web, it's also unlikely that those emails came with an unsubscribe button.

And once you've painfully setup Outlook rules to automatically delete those emails from HR with 10 MB attachments of pictures that are powerpoint slides with 1990s clipart, there are email threads where half the reply-all emails are requests by colleagues asking other colleagues to not do reply-alls, you are still left with too much email.

The seasoned among you painstakingly move emails to folders or use tags to organize emails by subject and clear them with military efficiency, but that is still a tremendous amount of cognitive effort wasted on a problem that should truly never exist in the first place.

But I'd like to dial it back a bit and look at this problem through the lens of history, from the point of view of how email started. When you look at the user interface elements and design language of email, you see words like Inbox, Outbox, memos, carbon copy (Cc) and office clips (for attachments). Email was quite literally a digital version of how companies dealt with office communication using paper, typewriters, clips & actual human beings who delivered copies of messages to everyone's "inbox", which was actually a tray on everyone's table. When you wanted to send a message, you typed it out and put it in the "Outbox" and on a pre-printed slip of paper, wrote the names of the people you wanted to send it to. Those in the Cc list got a carbon copy. For the millennials here, a carbon paper allowed someone to write simultaneously on another sheet of paper.

Your physical Inbox was always sorted by recentness simply because the office memo boy who'd deliver your memos would place any new memo on top of that bundle. It might have been more useful to read and reply to memos "oldest first" so that you wouldn't have this asymmetry of the oldest messages getting the most delayed responses, but that made it less efficient for the human message delivery staff, so they left it up to employees to figure out what order they want to reply to messages.

So, why is this bit of history important? Digital email systems have just faithfully and skeumorphically replicated the physical memo delivery system on computers and TCP/IP networks. In the last 40 years, very little has changed in the design of email systems. No one thought to fundamentally rethink those metaphors till Gmail and newer versions of Outlook came along with priority inboxes and algorithmic sorting based on importance. But the vast majority of large enterprise email systems continue to be faithful digital replicas of paper based communication systems from the early half of the previous century.

So if you are wondering why collaboration remains a problem within your company, you might want to start by taking a long, hard look at email.

That's it for part 1. Part 2 will deal with what kinds of collaboration work better over email and what doesn't.