I have been thinking about this a lot and I am sure that I am not going to get this out in one post. I am however officially fed up with E-mail. I am so fed up that I am no longer going to refer to it in its supposedly grammatically correct form “E-mail” or “E-Mail” instead it will be called “The ill communicator”(email) for short. It doesn’t really even deserve a hyphen.
I have been using a couple of other communication devices heavily over the past 6 months to a year:
IM - for both work and pleasure (but actually mostly work)
Text Messaging - mostly with my wife (who actually is quite fond of text messaging now)
Twitter - Ok don’t ask. If you don’t know … I can’t help
Facebook - this is more of a time sync for me than any of the above
Blog - goodness it’s been a long time since I have been here
I have used Facebook and Twitter to get some feed back on E-mail. Using the “Questions” application in Facebook I asked the following question:
“What is an appropriate length for an email?”
While I did not get an optimal response (only 2 people answered it) they echoed some of the sentiments that I have.
Too much text in an email equals 2 things:
1.) Delayed Response - if I have to sit and think for more than 20 seconds when I am reading your email then I am probably not going to respond quickly.
2.) No Response - it is quite possible that I may never respond to emails that are more than 2 paragraphs.
One of my friends sent me this link which I thought was interesting:
Rising Email Immunity Leads to Conflict in Email Etiquette
It was actually one of the most poignant Blog posts that I have read in a while. It talks about the changes that are going on in the world around communication. How we are soo connected. I know people that sit on top of their Inbox and “wait” for emails to come in. They feel like they have completed tasks because they responded to their email.
I spent 45 minutes at 9:45 tonight going through my emails for the day. It is like extra work, on top of my regular job. When I read that blog post it was like right on. Many times I think that when I respond to someone’s 4 paragraph email with a sentence that I am being rude. In my mind there are better devices to have a “conversation” with. Email should be used for quick things like “Did you get that email I sent” and “Are you going to reply to my email”.
I am not saying that Twitter is the answer, I just think that we are all going to get to the point where email is just not sustainable.
Filed under: Social Networking, Social Software, What I am reading, communication, society, time management
