Ever since starting my new position at Samuel Merritt I've grown to loathe email. Or at least reply-all email threads that solve nothing. There have been several such threads in my corner of the library world in recent weeks.
At UCSF I would pummel my poor supervisor Gail with endless email. That's not really true--by the time I left the emails were fewer and shorter, and instant message and f2f conversations were a better way to communicate in most cases. But even so I preferred email to meetings with other people on staff, since I prefer writing to speaking. That's still true sometimes, but no longer at work.
These days I pick up the phone and walk over to people's offices. I find any excuse to get out of my own office, despite the Japanese motif and the soothing portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Graziano, the benefactors who established Samuel Merritt's John A. Graziano Memorial Library. I've changed my ways due to a belated recognition that email is a bane more than a blessing, especially the curse of reply-all.
The curse occurs when someone sends an inquiry to a group of people. Everyone must chime in, taking the conversation in directions it would not go in real-time. Everyone reads the emails at different paces, in the midst of different responsibilities, and responds to different points. Soon there's a cacophony rather than a conversation. This stuff should be happening on a wiki (and my staff has been game to try, which is great.)
Alas, I too have been guilty of contributing to the curse of reply-all. But I'm learning. These days I let many threads roll by, deciding that I'd rather appear aloof than add to the din. Or I'll try to respond only to the people who seem most invested in a particular issue, not to everyone. Or I'll send emails to all, with an explicit prohibition against reply-all chatter in response.
Soon after I began at SMU I read a Corner Office interview with Kasper Rorsted, the CEO of German company Henkel. At the time I focused on the fact that he simply deletes emails in which he's merely CC'd, because they are a "waste of time" and people only write them to "cover their back." Pretty bold, I thought.
But today I'm more struck by his general concern about email: "I do less e-mail and a lot more of being present...I think e-mail is very often disruptive in corporate cultures. You sit next to people and send e-mail to each other instead of walking over or making a call or just trying to look for the personal interaction. I use e-mail more and more as text messaging — just very, very short messages. It’s very efficient, but I am convinced that e-mail does not replace presence."
Hear hear Kasper. My new goal is to have a week in which no work email I write is more than three sentences long. That will leave a lot of time to actually talk.
I've gotten caught up in some of these same over-long, over-populated email conversations and have the same frustrations. My rule of thumb is that if you need more than three email exchanges on a topic you need to have a real conversation. Email is fine for exchanging information -- it is terrible for problem solving.
Posted by: T Scott | February 10, 2011 at 03:58 PM