Fatwa on e-mail? Not so quick!

I once worked with a very wise man who had this to say about e-mail:

People are always coming up to me in the halls and asking whether I got the e-mail they sent me, and why I hadn’t responded. I always tell them, I get hundreds of e-mails each day, and it takes me a while to sift through them. If something requires my attention, call me: I listen to voice-mail before I read through e-mails. If it’s really, really, really that all-fired important, come to my office. If I’m not there, leave me a note. Trust me, I’ll get back to you.

He was right, and I always remembered that, as a business rule of thumb, sending an e-mail does not convey urgency.

Another colleague at the same company told me that she had attended a seminar on time management, and the big take-away piece of advice was to check e-mail at regularly scheduled times during the day. Not every couple of minutes, which was way too distracting.

This was a decade ago, when we were already becoming slaves to our cell phones, our Palm Pilots, and our e-mails. Some folks wore pagers, but I always maintained that the only people who should be using pagers were guys whose wives were 9 month pregnant, folks who needed to know when the heart they were in the transplant line for became available, and the doctor who was going to perform the transplant.

Other than the “I’m important” guys who wore the pagers, we were not completely on. We were absolutely getting there, but we were not yet imprisoned by the real-time culture of IM, or the 24/7 demands of smartphones.

Still, it was easy enough to wake up to make a bathroom run at 4 a.m. and remotely access your office e-mail account via VPN to see who was looking for you. (And, oh, the brownie points and one-ups-man-ship of those 4 a.m. e-mail exchanges.)

Now, employees in professional occupations are generally expected to stay at least loosely tethered to work around the clock, even when they’re on vacation. In return, employees can at least theoretically expect to have some scheduling flexibility. So maybe the tradeoff’s worth it.

While everyone these days is way too harried by way too many e-mails – I’ve been to one of the Meadows and Byrne stores in Ireland, but I don’t remember buying anything there; so why are they sending me e-mails a couple of times a week, and do they really think I’m going to buy a turkey platter in Clonakilty and have it drop shipped to Boston? – e-mail’s just a part of the everything-overload problem.

Still, it’s a pretty big part of that problem, and some businesses are making efforts to minimize the use of in-house e-mails, or eliminate it altogether.

One such company is Atos Origin, a French IT services firm that “plans to ban internal e-mail form company communications within two years.” (Source: CNN.)

Instead, employees will communicate mostly through instant-messaging tools or wiki-like documents that can be edited by multiple users online.

"We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives," said Atos CEO Thierry Breton in a statement earlier this year. "At Atos Origin we are taking action now to reverse this trend."

M. Breton walks the walk, and claims not to have sent a work e-mail in the past three years:

"If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message," he told the newspaper. "Emails cannot replace the spoken word."

I agree, but neither can the text message.

Nor can a text message – or the spoken word – replace a well-wrought, well-thought-out e-mail, of the sort that we used to put on paper and call a memorandum.

I agree that most e-mails sent, received, and read (or, more likely, deleted unread) are less than useful. And for exchanges in which you need to relay or find some piece of info a.s.a.p., the text message, phone call, or personal appearance works best.

But sometimes you do have to communicate something to multiple people. And sometimes what you need to communicate just won’t fit in a tweet-sized message wrttn n txt.

The fact that e-mail usage is declining among the young folks

….who prefer faster, less formal means of communication such as texting or instant messaging on Facebook or Twitter

…doesn’t mean that there’s no room for the memo style e-mail. (Or the e-mail with memo.docx attached.)

IMHO, not to mention IMHE(experience), memos provide a means for the sender to organize their ideas and findings, and present them in a thorough, coherent format. For the receiver, they’re the means to read and evaluate a body of information without springing immediately into what their response is to some point raised on the third line.

As you may have surmised from this, when I worked full time, I was past master of the long, ultra-analytical memo in which I would hold forth on company culture, senior management’s lacking, process improvements, product ideas, etc. I remember one boss – the president of a small company I spent a lot of years with – stopping me in the hall and saying ‘I received your screed’, and letting me know that he was going to read it through again and get back to me to discuss it. This same guy had also told me that in many ways I was his ideal direct-report, in that I communicated my thoughts in writing and didn’t demand or expect much face time.

Things sure have changed if the Mr. Bigs of the world only want to hear from you in a txt msg or a hall chat.

And not necessarily for the better.

I, for one, don’t really want to live in a world where all that matters is what’s happening in the mo’, and where it’s no ‘think’ and all ‘do’.

If only I had someone to e-mail and tell them…