Stop. Sending. Email.

I cannot understand your point. If I get automatic notification on my taskbar saying I have new email and I am able to see beginning of the message, I am not under the pressure of constantly clicking "Check new email". The notifier does that automatically for me.
Emails are also great for communication since I don't have to reply the moment I'm asked a question (compared to phone call) and I can check all messages that I sent and received in past months.
Moreover, it can be encrypted and signed which makes email equivalent to a signed document.
Where is that rat?

Bonuses use this variable reinforcement. Programmers deal with logic, don't they? Yet they don't seem to think or behave logically when it comes to bonus systems, emails or many other aspects of daily life.

Well, doctors smoke and drink, even when they deal with people suffering from the consequences of such activities.

The blind watcher maker is still working away.

I also tend to disagree. I think e-mail is largely a blessing. You just have to be a little bit disciplined. If you're not, then offloading part of your communication to other places on the internet will probably just increase the problem, because now you have to check multiple sources.
The really nice thing about e-mail is that you don't have to respond instantly. You don't have to find a time at which you and your correspondent are both available. Instead you can both use times that are convenient for you. If you have something that requires immediate attention, by all means, use the phone! E-mail isn't very reliable in that case anyway.

Of course e-mail is not the be-all-end-all of communication. There are other means that are better suited in different situations. However, they all require your attention and they will all break your working flow if you don't have the discipline (or option) to not constantly (try to) engage in this communication.

Where were you? ;)

On emails, that is true considering big enterprises which employees actually receive hundreds of emails - or, non-company addresses which are subject to spam. But, in small companies with internal addresses on internal servers and therefore reasonably shielded from spam, and/or clients (can you say gmail?) with good spam filters, email can be a very valuable instrument of productivity. On the other hand, if you _don't_ check your email often yuo _can_ miss urgent information/things to do. Ok, there's always the phone, but imagine having a coworker (in another office) who's absolutely unable to convey a concept in spoken words without straying 100 miles west of the subject... then written email is your salvation :)

If you still press your "receive email" button you need to update your software.

I rarely send emails. They are to easily misinterpreted, especially in a discussion.

Now you have all the problems of email, but scattered in different places.

I'm going to mail a link to this article to everyone in my team.

[Shameless but relevant plug]

Hi,

This is exactly part of the problem we are trying to solve at Inbox2. Email applications have not seen any innovation at all in the last 20 years (except maybe for GMail who stirred things up a little bit). We are trying to change that.

The first step that we have taken is to create an activity stream around all your incoming email data. This allows you to filter our specific "persons" (regardless of which email account/social network they are sending you messages from).

The second step which we are working on now is to be able to priorotize "persons" during specific time periods "co-workers are more important during office-hours but a whole lot less important after office hours".

The third step (but this will take a while though) we will be moving towards is adding intelligence in your email app, but I won't talk to much about this just yet :-)

There are plugins and methodologies that allow you to add this to for instance Outlook/Gmail, etc. The only problem is, these are aftertoughts. Inbox2 builds these concepts in from the scratch (its a whole new email platform).

Check it out if you think it sounds interesting www.inbox2.com

- Waseem

Welcome back. But I cannot see the problem with email.

I don't spend my time continously checking for new emails, I have notification do that for me - yet your suggesting turning that off. I find twitter far more of a distraction, yet you recommend this as part of the answer. (If twitter is an answer, it must have been a stupid question.) You talk about the importance of maintaing work flow, and avoiding multitasking, yet advocate making phone calls requiring immediate attention.

It seems to me that email is the ideal solution to most of these problems, in that it allows you to control, when and what you respond to, as is appropriate to your current circumstances.

And the rat experiment doesn't really apply, as even if you check your email at fixed intervals, you won't receive a fixed reward. It's still just as much of a gamble.

Great stuff, man. This is SO important if one want to be more productive.

Here's what more you can do with email to be more productive:

- don't check your email first thing in the morning
- turn off email notifications
- setup email rules
- shut off your email for a couple of hours
- keep emails simple and to the point

Your first points call to mind MMOs as well.

In general I agree with Jeff, but a strong counter-argument is searchability. I keep all important emails for later reference. If a conversation happened on a forum, then it's comparatively invisible to later searching.

It's just self-control really, isn't it? You could swap 'checking email' for 'surfing bbc news' or 'checking facebook quick' or 'making another cuppa'.... there's lots of ways to procrastinate.

So you are saying that you have not posted in 2 weeks because you have been checking email obsessively?

I think I may prefer the rat to some coworkers; any idea where I can get one trained?

I disagree. I'd much rather send/receive email. That way I have a written record of what was said and can review that record. This is very important when I'm given a task to perform. My boss may ask me to make a black widget. After several days of building the widget I may not remember whether to paint it blue or black (my boss may not remember either). Then I can review that email and know to paint it black. Then when the boss says, "No, I told you to paint it green", I can point to the email and defend myself. This can save me a lot of time and arguement.

Plus, our culture has demanded that we answer the phone when it rings. This interrupts my chain of thought significantly. Even if I choose to ignore the phone, the ringing still interrupts my thought process. I'm a programmer. Perhaps I have just loaded a complicated algorithm in my brain and am trying to sort it out. Incoming email won't bother me. The phone...

I tend to disagree with your post too. Well, in essence you are right and we should stop sending email in cases where it is not the best medium. Still, I agree with most of the others that the alternatives you define (phone calls, twitter, forums, etc) are not better at all. They are more fragmented, and unlike email, there's a chance nobody ever sees it.

Email is not the problem, workforce trends are. A few things are going on. Where we used to have location-specific departments in the same room, we now have colleagues across the globe. We outsource things which opens yet more information and communication channels. Information size is exploding and we are expected to multi-task like crazy. Our networks grow from a few local guys to hundreds of people from all over. We work across timezones.

I could go on, but I think it is clear that the amount of email you get is not because of email. It is because of the amount of communication channels and the size of your network.

Finally, you are also ignoring the fact that email is used as much more than just a communication medium. It is also used as a planning system, a document management system, a discussion forum, a legal repository (to put things in writing), etc, etc.

"Email is dead" posts I have seen for years already. This is just another one. The reality is that email is still increasing. Twitter will not fix it, nor Google Wave, because they cannot fix the problem. The problem is not the tool, it is the inevitable growth of our networks and therefore our communication channels.

I agree with the other folks here. I actually make a point to tell my staff (I'm in IT), NOT to call me. I don't pick up the phone and check my VM only once a day. If anything, the concepts here apply to VoiceMail more than email. I mean, talk about a productivity waster!

Pick up the phone, dial the VM. Wait for attendee. Dial password. Listen to new message count. Press 1. Wait for whoever it is to say hello, and work up the nerve to ask me whatever it is they need. And deal with their ridiculously thick accent most of the time. And then I have to take notes!! That's an interruption.

And I don't check email, it notifies me. And I have a record of everything that was requested. It's like letting the requester take the notes for me!

Not to mention it's non-intrusive. I don't have to worry about whether the person is busy, or in a meeting, or even in the office (Thanks to Blackberries). They can be alerted to my question and answer at their earliest convenience. No worrying about scheduling face-time.

In fact, when I *DO* get verbal requests, I always instruct the person to "write me an email", so I can check back and the end of the day and see if I have forgotten anything.

I think there are things in the office environment that are much bigger time wasters than checking email.

Personally, I would like a cappachino IV and catheter.

Jeff is making several points here, actually. First, the biggest problem is checking your email constantly, as if it's going to deliver a present at any moment. Instead, it just interrupts your "flow" and your ability to get real work done. I suffer from this and thanks to Jeff for the reminder that I need to cure myself.

Second, email really isn't a great medium for some work. Face to face conversation is a lost art. People often resort to sending a five page email that the recipient won't read rather than have an actual conversation in person or on the phone (yeah, I know this can be difficult between time zones, but how many times do you IM or email the guy in the next cubicle with something important? Too many.) Then the recipient will ignore your monster email precisely because it's so long and complicated. Sometimes it's better to have the conversation and follow it up with an email so there's a record of the decision that was made. On top of that, you never know what you'll find out when you actually talk to someone - new product plans, layoffs coming, new hires, etc., plus the commeraderie that it builds. Email is overused and abused. It's not bad and it's the right answer sometimes, but it's the default, and not always appropriate.

I see your point(s), but email actually makes me *more* productive. Its biggest benefit, as mentioned here above, is that it's asynchronous. It does not interrupt me nearly as much as a phone call or a meeting or the random colleage wandering over to my cube.

Email, IMs, Facebook, BLOGS, RSS Readers, Twitter, MEETINGS, MySpace.... and the like = MASSIVE TIME SINKS and are not in any way productive.

Hey Now Jeff,

Stop Sending Emails, thx 4 the info!

Coding Horror fan,

Catto

These blog posts get more and more pointless as the weeks go on...

Another thing about face-to-face meetings. People love to gather in the conference room to stroke the ego of themselves and each other by yapping away, but how often do you leave a meeting with nothing to show for it?

Most times I meet with people there are only a few people taking notes, and that usually stops about 5 minutes in. Personally, I don't even bother bringing a pad with me anymore. I'd rather listen than jot.

And yet, when the meeting is over, I remember all being in agreement about... something. But don't really know what my gameplan is or what the actionable items were. I usually have to send post-meeting emails, to verify that I came away from the meeting with the right info.

So if I have to ask via email what to do, what actual good was the meeting in the first place?

I always leave the gmail tab open in my browser the whole day so I am not exactly hitting 'check for new mail' often. But I do agree email occupies major portion of a pie chart that shows causes of information overload. Gmail took a major step forward towards organizing email and email management - that of grouping related conversations by subject and providing a single email store called 'archive' that could do 'catch-all' that you wouldnt have to worry about.

Until additional approaches to overcoming the flood of incoming email are tried, we wont know if they would work or not. Some of the thinks I can think of (in the context of gmail or other web based email app) are as follows. In my idea, there are no folders or labels concept, you only have one thing to look at in your visual radar - the ubiquitous inbox. But there can be multiple views of viewing the inbox by using selective filters.

- Priority emails - If you get purchase notifications from your website via email (paypal payment notifications, server down notifications from your website monitoring service, emails from your business partner, etc.), you want to attend to them first so there needs to be a way to make them appear at the top of the inbox (using some filter criteria). Uptill now the only parameter of how email filters operate is by sending incoming email into folders or labeling them but that requires one extra step of navigating into that folder and contributes to visual clutter because you have a growing number of folders that immediately appear in your visual field and you start feeling overwhelmed. Setting up labels for filtering them into different folders spreads the areas to be viewed and clicked into multiple levels of action that requires human effort expense.
- Sticky emails (bookmarked emails) - Emails that you can mark as 'needing further action' need to have a way so that they always appear at the top of the inbox.
- Multi-level tree-structured labels/folders with drilldown but you dont have to set up the labels first - the email program should set this up automatically. Gmail only allows you a top level classification in the form of labels. The tree would be built by different columns of the email database which you can choose.

By Sender->expanding tree->Click Sender->Inbox view only shows all correspondence to/from sender. You could do this with 'from:' search inside gmail. Or instead of occupying a visual area created by a tree structure, there can be a better option thought out.
By Filed Tags that you assign to emails->So you could group unrelated conversations into threads if you assign the same tag to multiple email threads. In gmail, conversation threading can happen only if the subject matches. But lets say you want to assign tags to emails so you could group #webdesign related emails in one bunch even if the word 'web design' doesnt appear anywhere in the email - #webdesign is a user associated tag - any fast to recall, easy to remember tag would do. This way this is different from a standard 'search filter' that filters email by search phrase 'web design'.

Able to edit emails for brevity and save them - people send lot of trailing ">"s that are simply regurgitations of existing, previous emails, there need to be a way to wiki-ize and remove repetitions, add pertinent infos and save the structure as it appears modified. (but it wont be compatible with existing mail protocols like smtp/pop3 etc). May be there needs to be a self-editable private wiki which you can build like a chronological log of correspondences on a particular subject etc by copy pasting email text and deleting the redundant text and adding any information you find meaningful. Then you could delete the emails you no longer need because you've copied the data you want to keep for perpetual record in the form of a wiki (or other note taking app). In short email data needs to be moved out of the inbox into a more manageable, queryable at high speed form, and then the corresponding emails deleted from the inbox. This contributes to the 'clean slate' 'fresh start' feeling (called zero inbox personal productivity method). With a blank mind, you can be more productive rather than with a cluttered mind just as if the mind copies what it sees and visualizes it - a cluttered overloaded inbox = a cluttered overloaded already occupied brain that cant accept anything more.

- Calendar-based email navigation or some other method that only shows a subset of emails and other emails are hidden from the current view. Much like in Google's Web History view. If you click a date on a calendar then only correspondences on that date will be displayed. This way you can always keep up with a 'cut off date' of emails that you ahve attended to. 'All emails up to and including 03-29-09 I have gone through and attended and there is no further action required on them' - > then those can be moved to the wiki-type email archive and removed the inbox once and for all.

I advise everyone to view Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

And also, if you like it Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

We ( developers ) loose productivity on their rampage to check and check email, even if it's only notifications. You break away from you mindset and it takes time getting back there.

Regards,

cool story, bro

I think Jeff's not talking about *receiving* email as the reward. He's talking about receiving *juicy* email that's the reward. So yeah, I'll see a badge on my mail app's icon when I have new mail, but do I have my mail app set to check frequently, and am I constantly glancing down at that badge, and when I do have new mail, do I feel compelled to look at it right away, and when I do look at it, am I hoping for certain kinds of "fun" messages?

A similar example would be constantly checking Facebook. Or, say, constantly reloading a blog page hoping someone responded to my comment.

P.S. I never had any interest in those apps that check mail for you -- the idea seemed silly -- but if I can see at a glance the *subject* lines of recently arrived emails without going into my mail app, this might serve as a kind of methadone or nicotine patch for email addiction.

So...what does it mean if I obsessively check CodingHorror to see it there's a new blog post.

"Cheese, please...cheese, please...cheese, please......OH YEAH! MORE CODINGHORROR CHEESE!!!!"

@wandercoder

"...the biggest problem is checking your email constantly, as if it's going to deliver a present at any moment."

So why not turn on notification?

"On top of that, you never know what you'll find out when you actually talk to someone - new product plans, layoffs coming, new hires, etc., plus the commeraderie that it builds."

Face to face has its place, but I think the above shows why it can be more of a loss to prouductivity than email. A question that could have been answered in a couple of minutes, ends up as a whole morning's gossip. Killing productivity for everyone in hearing range.

Another advantage of email over face to face, is that it's possible to cc everyone who needs to be involved in the conversation. Without email it's too easy to miss an important decision just because you were out of the office when a conversation too place.

Did anybody else notice that all the people that defended emails wrote long replies?

I think that your day to day job defines how you deal with e-mail.

Some people are working heads down on a coding a new feature or fixing a tough problem. For them e-mail is a distraction. (Jeff you appear to be in this boat.)

Other people are in the problem triage area. They are getting messages from various streams and need to sort it all out to keep the team moving forward. Some people might call this the manager of a team but there are also other team members that are in this mode, think about handling issues with support and installation (yea, someone has to do this work.)

For those that are in the problem triage area e-mails is really useful. It provides a searchable record of what is going on and who is involved. Phone calls and meetings are too ephemeral for a some communication.

I'm still trying to see how Twitter is useful for all this. Some people keep a separate monitor dedicated to a twitter client. How is that not distracting? Also you can't use twitter for internal communication about general company business. Jeff, you have it good here, Stack overflow is generally quite public in concept, you can't do that with most companies.

If you applied the same rationale to speech or telephone use as you do to email, your argument would sound absurd. Why should it be valid for email? It's just a medium.

I have Gmail (and Google Talk).

I get notifications, from none to a few, in the course of a day.

I NEED to reply to those emails to get my job done.

I disagree with your suggestion!

Ah that wonderful destroyer of rational thought, the email treadmill. I found that I had two email systems open at all times on my desktop, GMail for personal and then Outlook for work. I would compulsively check each many many times an hour, to the detriment on my main gig, which did not include obsessively checking email in it's job description. I finally handled this by closing all e mail programs and only launching them three or four times a day. Usually after my boss called me asking the stupidest of all corporate questions "Did you get my e mail?". Well if you pressed the send button, I can almost guarantee you that I did indeed receive it. Or my in-box did at least, even my pitiful IT department could do email properly. I usually found the the contents of the email were non life-threatening and usually pretty trivial. But he had to have that instant response there by affirming his managerial chops. Of course this entire exchange totally derailed whatever thought process I was currently entertaining so it wasted an hour or so until I could get back into that zone where code would just flow off my fingers like water off a ducks back, if I could ever get back there at all. Then my job devolved into simply checking my working programs, which took 5 minutes out of my day. Took me years to get to the point where my programming skills did my eight hours of work, leaving me for more important things, like Desk Top Tower Defense, and the occasional bug fix. The I went back to obsessively checking my email again, mainly because I was bored out of my freaking mind.

The issue I have with this is, in our office, if we DON'T check our email every 5-10 minutes, we are told that we "aren't keeping on top of things." Makes it hard considering I have to break my concentration each time. Otherwise, I agree with your post.

The question about email is which is to be the master: you or the email system. If you feel like you have to check and respond all the time, it's the master, and you're not going to get much work done. If you are the master, then you check when is convenient to you, when you're between stretches of concentration, and then you get all the communication since you last checked.

Use it wisely and it's a very good tool, but you can also use it as a major distraction.

I agree with empi that there some important advantages to email that you skipped over (such as the audit trail aspect).

I was also suprised you didn't take the opportunity to plug Stackoverflow when listing appropriate communication channels :-)

You also make some good points. The question is, does Google Wave suffer from all of the same issues?

How is Twitter going to solve this problem??? It's even more text.

You know, some email clients use this wonderful invention called "slide notifications."

Outlook and Thunderbird being two that I can think of that do this.

It shows you the sender and subject line of an email, then fades out after a few seconds.

Therefore, you can glance at it, see it's not important, and continue working.

Or if it is important, make a mental note that when you're finished with whatever you're currently working on to look at it.

"Email problem" is in fact "Information overload problem".
The solution is not to switch to different mediums, but to learn to treat emails more efficiently:

1) Learn to recognize spam and useless emails early.
Setup spam filters.
Teach people who email you to send you only useful emails.
The great way to teach it is NOT to reply to useless emails.

2) Learn when to reply to email and when not to reply.
Even if you reply -- be brief and to the point.

3) If possible -- put only one actionable request into one email.

I check my person e-mail once a day. Everything goes directly to junk, except for mail from people I know, or from news letters I subscribe (though the news letters go into specific folders and are read when I have time). My work e-mail address is only used for work, I do not give it out to anyone that is not directly related to my job, and I receive no spam or otherwise generally un-useful information. Perhaps it isn't e-mail that is broken. Perhaps, you just do not use it correctly. I do not spend an inordinate amount of time sifting through garbage because all the garbage goes to my junk folder, which I empty weekly. Get yourself a personal e-mail address and share it only with friends and family. Use that address for standard communications. Use your work e-mail for work and get a public address that you can sift through occasionally. Learn to separate your e-mail, compartmentalize and e-mail works!

The whole internet is like that. There might be something important somewhere, hiding, eluding. But when you find it, profits!

I could not agree less. Sure my spam email account gets a ton of crap. My business email account gets only business emails. Email used correctly provides a perfect trail. It is not a bother or a nuisance. It is the preferred method of contact for almost every client I have and definitely mine.

I think the problem is more Twitter than email. Twitter addicts are the ones constantly cheeking to see if anyone cares that you had scrambled for breakfast. Reminds me of smokers, got to have that next fix. Have yet to see a tweet worth reading ever.

Yes Jeff I am talking to you. I listen to the podcast and you slide in a twitter comment all too often.

Refreshing Stackoverflow every few seconds has nothing to do with this, right?

I use email because I can use it without a web browser, and web apps suck.

Part of the back-and-forth argument here is that there are (at least) two kinds of people when it comes to what constitutes an "interruption".

For myself, oral (and aural) communication constitutes an entirely different mindset than written. When I'm heads-down programming (so I'm typing code into one window), I can fairly easily pop up another window, type in that one, and get right back to programming. Picking up the phone to make a call (or worse yet responding to someone walking into my cube) forces me to switch gears. Getting back to the code now takes much longer -- I have to retrace my steps and re-create the chain of thought.

My boss, on the other hand, hates reading. Oral communication is always less intrusive to him than reading and responding to email. He had to teach me the evils of over-emailing. I'm much better now, but it's always going to be my first gut reaction to email (and ask to be emailed).

What I've learned to do is a) consider the source (and target) of my communication and b) balance the personal convenience RIGHT NOW of firing off an email with the total amount of time gained from walking away from my cube and having a quick face-to-face to get all the info I need at once.

The advice in this article makes good sense when applied to someone who is a popular blogger, a creative professional, or some other form of self-employed independent contractor who has the luxury of choosing what to work on and when.

Sadly, though, it's just not very realistic for the rest of us who have to work a regular 9 to 5 gig and have no choice but to respond on a schedule that someone else sets. For most, that's a much bigger obstacle to overcome than any mountain of email.

We waited 18 days for this?

I have to disagree with this article. I think it might be because I use instant messaging, phone conversations, text messages, and e-mail all for different purposes so maybe I am not experiencing this problem. I get mail pushed to my mobile devices, and I don't constantly check it. I actually used to be more obsessive about checking my mail back when I had to open a mail client on my phone or use the browser on the device to check (circa 2007). I guess I differentiate between slow mediums such as e-mail and phone rather than instant mediums such as texting and messaging.

Because of this, I cannot agree with this article at all from my own perspective, but I do know what you mean in a corporate prespective. I've many times gotten 100 e-mails about something. Instead of having an IM system setup to handle that or a program that just pops up in the bottom right annoying you with these requests or making beeping noises, most people just forward all of that to e-mail. You're extremely right on about how people multipurpose e-mail. The problem is that e-mail isn't design for most of these purposes and is probably the worst method of accomplishing these methods. Worse yet, most companies pile everything into one account rather than many so all 100 e-mails are for 100 different programs and tasks that have no relation to one another.

I would also be interested to see a post explaining how Twitter solves the information overload problem. Other than the fact that it sort of absolves some of the guilt of not replying -- the ephemeral nature of the Twitter feed seems to make it a little more plausible to use the excuse that you "missed" something -- I don't really see much difference compared to email. And a fairly major downside of the ephemeral nature of Twitter is that it's difficult for people to know whether someone has already asked a given question 10 times.

Unfortunately, most bosses believe that all of their questions require "an urgent, immediate answer"

I wholeheartedly agree with this!

I always have my iPhone on vibrate. Just a week or two ago, I went into my notification settings and turned Email notification off. I check my iPhone enough anyhow, it doubles as my watch, and when I respond to texts and phone calls. Now when my phone vibrates, I know it's because someone is trying to get ahold of me directly.

My life has actually been quite a bit happier with email notification turned off.

I can;t believe no one has already pointed out that Jeff, being a somewhat internets celebrity is probably deluged by more email that most of us. Jeff apparently can;t figure out that his situation (either compulsion to check updates) or the fact that he gets more correspondence than others, doesn't necessarily translate to the entire world, or even all other developers.

Oh well. In general it is good advice to keep reviewing your daily habits and practices to cut out waste. Blindly following some "guru's" advice on the internets is not the best way to do this.

What works for Jeff probably won;t work for you and what works for you doesn't work for Jeff...

Great article! I just forwarded it to all my friends :)

E-mail can become a hindrance, if you can't control yourself. It really is just another medium for communication, it's not like you can't get carried away by not wanting to get off of the phone either. The real problem is priorities and keep them in balance.

So I do think time management might have been a more valuable aspect to look at, instead of just saying e-mail is bad.

There are several issues here.

1. Distraction

Compulsive email checking and real-time notifications are distracting for many. And hopefully it's socially acceptable within your workplace and/or among your friends to curb such distractions.

It should be reasonable to expect email to function asynchronously. Simply, none of us should expect a reply the same day. And certainly not within moments. Unfortunately, many disagree.

2. Email as a Medium

Email has many failures:

- Privacy
- Authentication
- Urgency
- Collaboration (backlog of ">>>>" and ridiculous subject prefixes "RE: FWD: Re: RE: Fwd:")
- Versioning
- Archive/Organization

SPAM, phshing, and inbox clutter are all symptoms of the failures above.

Needed improvements:

- asymmetric encryption
- reliable priority/importance flags
- formal conversation/discusstion entities
- attachments should probably be disallowed outright in favor of FTP hosting
- shared, editable labeling/tagging

3. Etiquite

Email isn't going away anytime soon. What can we all do today?

Email (especially in the workplace) should be crafted with as much care as is given to printed communication.

- use meaningful subjects
- make the purpose obvious
- usually request only one action per email
- emphasize the action requested
- keep it short and simple
- check spelling
- proofread

Just about zero of my coworkers agree agree with any of this. :(

4. Alternatives

Does anything exist on the market right now or in the near future that will help?

GMail labels, conversation grouping, and archive features are all good patches on top of the broken system.

Various encryption solutions exist, but they're uncommon and far from standardized.

We can escalate/deescalate or otherwise transfer communication to a different, hopefully more appropriate medium:

- Telephone
- Voice Mail
- Instant Message
- SMS
- Wiki
- Blog
- Bulletin Board
- Discussion Group
- Social Network
- Media Sharing Site
- Collaborative Editor
- Bug Tracker

These each have their pros and cons.

The big problem: It's difficult to organize different types of information within a single system. Within multiple, it's a nightmare.

That said, the Google Wave demo video is quite impressive. Whether it ultimately works as advertised, it is still movement in the right direction.

"I see your point(s), but email actually makes me *more* productive. Its biggest benefit, as mentioned here above, is that it's asynchronous. It does not interrupt me nearly as much as a phone call or a meeting or the random colleage wandering over to my cube."

Exactly. On a day when I get a dozen email requests for help, I am still generally very productive throughout the day. On a day when people stop by to ask questions two or three times in the day, my day is completely ruined.

Yes, there's a point where our email skills fail us and one face-to-face meeting works better than a dozen emails (note: getting ten people on a conference call is almost NEVER better than an email chain or Wiki page for communication, but face-to-face communications can exceed written words). But, IMHO, those are both far between and trainable. Exercise your written communication muscles and maybe you'll see some improvement!

I want my email provider to send me a Tweet when email arrives...

It scares me to think that you propose 10 different ways to deal with situations (Ie. Kudos, send it to a notice board, etc).

Email is still the defacto standard when it comes to communicating with most interfaces, I would worry that any other could fall through the cracks.

Until a better method comes out I'm sticking with email. We do need to get rid of spam mail though...

I received this link on my Gmail WebClip

I think the article is spot on: e-mail is the ultimate productivity killer.

I have no idea how any of you e-mail lovers manage to do any *real* work done while being constantly notified about new stuff in your inbox. It's certainly not possible if you are a designer, a programmer, or any other creative professional.

Checking e-mail periodically throughout the day, which Jeff recommends — even as often as once an hour — allows you to have periods of distraction-free time, which can be used for creative work. You can *never* fully focus on a task if you know that a new email might arrive any second.

Regarding the "Stop sending email" part: I wouldn't say it is realistic to think that all the people, who just mastered using e-mail a couple of years ago, will suddenly start utilizing tools like blogs or Twitter accounts; but this is going to happen once everybody learns that it's easier to create a Facebook event for a party than Cc 30 people from their address book.

Jeff, this is a great article and you are clearly ahead of the game; keep creating.

I can't understand the logic here... maybe the point was misrepresented but it sounds like you propose using (and as a result, checking) 10 different mediums instead 1 to save time and increase productivity?

Here's a better idea:

1. Don't use twitter, don't use facebook, don't use myspace - save that for your own time.
2. Don't sign up for all kinds of crap online, you won't get so much spam.
3. Install a proper spam filter.
4. Do your job.

I think the differentiating factor here to note is that you're writing largely for software developers, but you're not one - at least not only one. You are a 'public figure', you market your software/websites via things like facebook/twitter/blogs. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most developers don't do those things, and the argument doesn't really apply.

Case in point: I get maybe 20 e-mails/day. About 15 of which are fogbugz auto-mails about things that do need to be looked at/prioritized. The rest don't even get a second glance past the outlook system tray popup until my break.

My Outlook has its own monitor so I can see my inbox all the time - and can decide if the mail in it is important enough to action.

I can effectively check my email without any more effort than sweeping my gaze to the right.

I put "checking for email" in the same category as "looking at my email to see what came in". Of course I have new mail; I'm not dead and the internet connection is working. I don't need some stupid red badge on the dock icon or a noise or worst of all a jumping visual alert.

The point here is that unless my actual work is fielding every message the moment it comes in - an online receptionist or help desk role - I should be able to ignore email for at least one & maybe two of my focused, productive chunks of time. Those time lengths vary by job - shorter for project managers (some but not all of the time), longer for programmers - but healthy company cultures expect heads down, flow time without trivial interruptions.

If there's something of higher priority AND urgency than what someone is accomplishing in their current focused chunk, then that interruption should come by phone, in person, or - if company culture has agreed that IM is a near-immediate interruption - by IM. (IM does have the distinct advantage over the phone of allowing you to finish the thought you were on or make a note of it before you respond).

The benefits of not allowing email to be defined as an interruption are huge.

Yay! Catto's back.

Email's great... it's a fairly standard, centralised place to receive all your notifications and communications.

Install an auto-checking mail notifier, and you no longer need to faff around clicking on "check mail". The computer tells you when there is some.

To become more productive, you need to syphon everything into email. Get email notification of your Facebook profile, Twitter direct messages, blog replies, etc.

That way you get *told* when there is some new information, rather than having to pull the much much worse one-arm-bandit lever of "are my Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/forums/blog replies containing new information yet?". And get an RSS reader so that it takes mere seconds to work out if there's new content on your favourite blogs.

Habitually clicking on "Gmail" every ten minutes is one thing, but it's not as bad as constantly cycling through ten websites and social networking sites in the hope of new pointless drivel to read.

It's easy to "defend" against the constant onslaught of pointless email and updates that aren't important. The world is good at sorting mail, it's done it for decades.

I have Thunderbird set to check for email every hour and all I get then is a non-obtrusive toast notification. That's never a distraction, as apposed to having to start the browser, get on the email account web interface, log in and finally check if there is any email - rinse and repeat.
That's the way too many people work with email - waste so much time on even having the activity called 'checking email'. I agree with Nicolas - web apps suck. Especially in this matter.

reminds me of inbox zero
http://inboxzero.com/inboxzero/

Meh. It must be "cool" to trash on email these days, as this is a sentiment I've heard repeated in numerous places.

Email is a tool. If you use it well and if it's suited to solving your problems, congratulations. But like any tool if it's making your task more difficult, it's time to get a new tool. These one-size-fits-all "beware email" articles simply peddle fad-following sham advice suitable for the horoscope page of your local newspaper.

> We're so ecstatic to get that single useful email out of hundreds
> that we can't keep ourselves from compulsively pressing the new
> email lever over and over and over, hoping it will happen again
> soon, like the caged rats in Skinners' experiments.

WHAT? Who in their right mind is ecstatic about getting new email? When you really check for email like a caged rat, email is _NOT_ your main problem!

If you can't resist checking for email because it might contain something interesting, how exactly do you manage to ignore twitter, facebook, some forums, blogs, wikis, or whatever for extended periods of time? If you can do this, you should be able to do the same with email.

The channel is not your problem. The quantity and quality information you receive over that channel is. If you send/receive the same quantity and quality of information via one or several other channels, you gained nothing. You just have to check several places instead of one to see if there is something new...

I check my inbox when I get a notification that I have new email. :}

There is almost no difference between pushing a button to check for new mail or clicking on every notification message.
You're out of your current train of thoughts and need several minutes to recover from the disruption.
And yes, i'm clicking on every outlook notification because i'm curious.
Switching off the notification really makes sense.
There might be some important mails (e.g. from my boss), so i'll set up a new rule in my mail client to play a sound for these senders.

Yawn.

I would prefer to funnel most of my communication through email. I then have 1 inbox to check, instead of many. Google Voice is based on the concept of one inbox.

@Sebastian Dadal

"You can *never* fully focus on a task if you know that a new email might arrive any second."

So how do you focus knowing that the phone might ring any second, or someone might call round any second to ask a question? With email you can always turn off email when you absolutely need no interruptions, but you can't ignore the phone or personal visits.

People are different, and company's are different, but all I can say is I'm honestly far less distracted by emails (which I can quickly glance at and decide how important it is), than by constant phone calls (including having to answer for anyone out of the office), and by conversations.

@Phenwoods: I am not denying the fact that phones or personal visits are distracting. In fact, you should probably turn off or mute your phone, shut the door etc. when you have something important to work on.

Nothing is going to happen if you do.

You might think checking email only takes seconds; but remember that even if you stop working just for half a minute to read that new email, you will need at least 15 minutes to get into the "flow" again, which means that every email/notification you read might cost you a lot more time than you realize.

Now I want to say that what I write here mostly applies to creative work. Maybe what you do doesn't require getting into the flow; but from my experience as a designer, having prolonged periods of time with NO distractions whatsoever is the only way to produce anything of value.

Hmm, sounds pretty similar to your other favorite tools twitter and stackoverflow. Really you aught to be careful what you point out, when your whole (stackoverflow) business model is based on variable rewards (up votes, badges, it's all pretty exiting, will I get one today?)

Speaking of stackoverflow, I totally miss up-voting responses. Even Scott Adams has a voting system on his comments.

What, no oranges?

My problem is how to not spend all day on e-mail. I get more actionable e-mail than I can respond to in a 9 hour day.

I agree with Jeff. Actually I'm a little bit surprised that some guys here don't think email becomes a problem nowadays. Maybe they don't receive a lot of emails everyday, or maybe they have special hacks to handle emails efficiently, or maybe their daily job is checking email, making decision and sending email...
My experience is that emails, especially in large enterprises, are distracting, especially when your job is not handling emails. Also sometimes email is not the effective way of communication. That's why we need to consider other ways of communication and be cautious when writing emails.

I agree with Jeff. Actually I'm a little bit surprised that some guys here don't think email becomes a problem nowadays. Maybe they don't receive a lot of emails everyday, or maybe they have special hacks to handle emails efficiently, or maybe their daily job is checking email, making decision and sending email...
My experience is that emails, especially in large enterprises, are distracting, especially when your job is not handling emails. Also sometimes email is not the effective way of communication. That's why we need to consider other ways of communication and be cautious when writing emails.

What spam? I have almost never received spam on my office email address. (Except for the occasional Dominos discount mailer. But I dont mind that).
But if you are in the habit of tossing around your email address at all possible occasion you get then you are in trouble. And I must say gmail does an excellent job at filtering spam from my personal email. So no spam there either.

So its safe to say that all the mail I get on my official email account was mail that was supposed to come to me. But then there is always the endless 10 page droning about some mind numbing trivial issue at work which people insist on solving by sending emails only.

I am usually CC'd on most such emails.

Solution: Select All > Right click > Mark as read.

I agree with the recommendations for dealing with incoming mail, but not for replacing it with other forms of communication. As far as distractions go, email is far less of one than phone (requires immediate response), face to face (requires immediate response, sometimes ending up at someone else's desk), IM (annoying flashing windows for such messages as "lol") and meeting (large chunk of time taken up trying to stay awake while listening to other people discuss topics of no interest to you). It is no worse and quite possibly better than using a public forum, which will have no better notification method than your email system and as others have mentioned, can result in the same addictive refreshing that you blame on emails. Also, using email as the primary communication tool, even if it's not the optimal medium for most forms, means that only one place needs to be checked for messages and a search for old communication (which I have to do regularly because that's how long it takes to get things done in public service) needs to only be performed in the one place.

I send an email maybe twice a month. But I check my email more times a day than I can count. Of course, "check my email" translates to switching to the Gmail tab, glancing for spatial changes, then going back to what I was doing. I don't really think there's much harm done. And no, I don't Twitter instead of emailing either. Although I did go on a binge of sarcastic Facebook status updates for a couple weeks once.

It is a quite predictable result of the test on mices.
In nature food, resources and dangers does not follow a fixed pattern distribution it time and territory, but they rather follows complex, at first random-looking patterns.
The better is the animal in exploiting the pattern to gather more energy and avoid dangers, the better odds has it to survive and pass its genes.
So a fixed pattern reward does not trigger any bells in our instinctive part of mind, while a random pattern reward challenges the irrational part of us to exploit it as in nature, even if the rational part well knows it is true random, not just complex and random-looking.

Although we are all rat but i tend to agree on this with Jeff and i remember this is what we have been taught back in university days while studying Effective Business Communication or later in Project Management methodologies.
I am not sure i still remember the uni's subject title but somehow it resembles with this "Seven Pillars of Unified Communications"
(http://unifiedcommunicationsblog.globalknowledge.com/2009/07/22/seven-pillars-of-uc/)

@Sebastian Dadał

“In fact, you should probably turn off or mute your phone, shut the door etc. when you have something important to work on.”

As I said, circumstances vary. It’s good that you have a room with a door to yourself, and that nobody’s going to complain if you ignore phone calls. Others have to work in open plan offices, where you are expected to not only pick up your phone, but those of anyone else not at their desk. You cannot ignore a phone call like you can an email. And, it only takes one person in the office to get involved in a lengthy phone call to distract everyone.

By contrast, emails are silent, only distract those involved, and can usually be put on hold until a suitable time.

“even if you stop working just for half a minute to read that new email, you will need at least 15 minutes to get into the "flow" again”

Again, people vary, but I don’t find that a quick glimpse of an email header has ever caused me 15 minutes to get back into the flow. This is very different to having to answer a question on the phone.

If you manually enter to your inbox every time to see if you got email, you are doing it wrong.

Email should be available at all times, minimized in your desktop and let it alert you when you receive something, just like you let your phone ring when you get a text or call, or like you set up an RSS feed to tell you if your favorite blog has been updated.

Making a manual request to a service to see if there is something new, it's just a waste of time. Let it work automatically and you'll be productive.

The problem comes when you try to use email for what it has not been designed, eg. Controlling the feedback from your customers, receiving tasks from your bosses, delivering tasks to your employees, etc.

There are specific tools for those tasks and if you use email chances are you will lose control and end up in a mess.

For months I've kept coming back expecting something interesting to read, but it's been nothing but meta blogging, trolling and making the most stupid assertions. According to Jeff, all the code I write sucks and if I'm not celebrating that it's all going to be web programming one day, I should find another profession.

Now in a self-referential, ironic (and amusing) twist, I've come to the conclusion that:

THIS BLOG IS A VARIABLE REINFORCEMENT MACHINE

I will no longer be pressing this button hoping for cheese.

I urge my fellow Coding Horror addicts: STOP. READING. CODING HORROR.

Do something else, anything... Eventually even rats stop pressing the button. How long will it take you?

I would say that the comments were more helpful/important than the article itself. All I do to fix the problem is set my mail program to check e-mail every half an hour when I'm working on something that requires a lot of concentration. And even then, I ignore the notification most of the time until I'm done doing what I'm doing, or I'm interrupted by someone. Maybe it's because I don't get a lot of e-mail, even less of which is actually important.

But then there was this comment:

"We do need to get rid of spam mail though..."

We can do our best to filter, track, and firewall spammers, but the day we get rid of spam will be the day we can trust to hold the entire Stanley Cup Playoffs in hell.

@J: I would, but sometimes I get bored at work, so I come here to see what stupidity is being espoused this time.

Set up your email to get rid of all the trash posts your company sends out. (No one ever reads them). Most of the time a few filters will make it pretty simple. Then setup a mail client that shows you a few of the lines of the email message when it does arrive. You can quickly check to see if it's worth answering without lifting a finger.

Now answering your emails except at certain points of the day will guarantee that something you have to respond to will be missed.

@Phenwoods

"If twitter is an answer, it must have been a stupid question."

This is the funniest (and truest) thing I've ready all day. I love it!

If you're not on my contact list, your email goes to the Junk folder. A quick scan once or twice a day with a single click and it all goes away. When I feel a phone or personal conversation is more appropriate (depending on the nature of the email or how many there were), I call/setup a meeting. Not too difficult.

Is this the Coding Horror Public Awareness channel?

Are you becoming a life coach?

What's next? Vilifying coffee & cigarettes?

I like the comparison to the rat hitting the button to get a reward. I think that actually describes how I interact with the task tray notification - when I see that new mail has arrived I feel compelled to check what it is, even though it is usually some system generated email about a build process or service desk ticket that I don't care about.

I think tomorrow I will turn off my task tray notifications and try fixed schedule email checking... I'll let you all know how it goes...

un-subscribe from what you never seem to find time to read anyway

I must admit, this did kinda seem like an arb post.

I read it, I read it again.. considered reading it again but simply stated out loud; "Jeff, that's just a load of crap". No constructional feedback here. Just crap.

I noticed this email vs. productivity dilemma some years ago, with office staff constantly interrupting their work to respond to email pings. Back then our office was connected to a remote mail server by dial up ISDN, set to send and receive all emails on demand, resulting in a huge phone bill. To reduce the phone bill I set the dial up to fetch and send email only once every two hours. Result: Productivity increased, staff were not distracted and, interestingly, no one noticed their emails were not instant.
Unfortunately, as soon as we changed over to permanent DSL the staff became email junkies. Now with Facebook and Twitter the distraction of 'random reward' is just too much!!

I don't really feel that email disturbs me - as my toolbar notifier alerts me when something relevant pops in. That said, it IS possible to spend entirely too much time reading/writing mail.

This is the equivalent of doing work about doing work - without actually doing the work! ;)

First, who constantly presses the send/receive button?

Second, who presses the send/receive button all the time?

Seriously - every mail client I can recall using in the past decade or more autochecks every X many minutes (configurable). The web-based ones do, too - either via AJAX or because you open a mail and then go back to Inbox, showing whether anything has come in the last 30 seconds.

The only time I ever check my email intentionally is when I'm expecting a specific message to appear - for example, from my fiancee :)

Otherwise, it's open all day in the background with either the little mail icon in the tray when a new message appears, or as a tab in my browser that I switch to periodically (or not, if I forget). Maybe there are people who impulsively check their email all day instead of doing work, but I've never met any who aren't quite a ways up in the management strata where their "work" *IS* reading and writing email.

It makes my life alot easier. It's exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks guys, keep up the good work!

Email has completely surpassed our expectations. I didn't even need training. The very best.

Wow, Jeff, you have hit a nerve here. I think that some of us aren't ready to give up the delusion.

Stop. Writing. Useless. Blogs.

@Eric: There is no delusion, I spend about 10 minutes emailing in a week.

I have no Twitter, I have no Facebook.

The people I care about are a 10 minute drive from home (max) and I see them almost every week.

Wow... a week without an article and then this is what we get? I expected a lot better, this just feels lazy.

I hope you don't make money of writing articles like this because it's not fair if you do. Very very weak.

Well, my neurotic e-mail checking got rewarded last night.

SE beta invitation. :)

Pen and paper works for me...

There is something about writing with a pen and paper, yes an old fashioned fountain pen vs typing.

I find that if I write it vs type it, the content is always much better. It seems that writing gives me enough time to think about what I am saying before well, I say it.

Too bad, it will be lost art far sooner than one might think...

I am surprised but gladdened that they are still teaching first graders handwriting.

When the go to teaching typing in grade 1 then it's over for writing, too bad...

I like the "right tool for the right job" idea.

Do you need an answer, or something done right now? Then don't email me (because I might have email turned off, or be in a meeting, or otherwise just not see it), and then complain when it's not done. Call - you'll get immediate feedback on what your results are going to be (or if I'm unavailable and thus not doing it).

Twitter/IM, I find, is useful as a halfway between phone (immediate response required) and email (answer in a few hours or next day). You know I saw it, but I can finish my current thought before replying.

Great point about the email. Though, i think its slightly blown out of proportion. The real reason im Commenting though is to ask, Why no updates for like a month? sorry, just curious. i think everyone is.

I tend to disagree with some parts of your post. Which age are we talking about pressing a receive email button to see new email?

Checking email is often a habitual. Being organized with email is the most essential I learnt over time as its everyday mess that I have clean up regularly and not do it too often that it impacts a lot on productivity.

Distributing your communication to multiple resources like twitter, blogs has also its pros and cons. All this while, your single source of information was email. When you distribute it, you organize the information well but you also spend more time managing it which is the hind side.

I used to love your blog, but WTF have you written lately? Maybe time to start coding again?

@Herman

"There is no delusion"

That's quite a universal negative. Are you sure that none of the 100 commenters is feeling defensive about spending an hour a day on email?

I don't have facebook or twitter either, but I took Jeff's post as a useful reminder to evaluate how much I'm investing in blogs and email. I don't live in the world where no one ever needs to evaluate his behavior. (It must be an interesting place, though.)

"Why no updates for like a month? sorry, just curious. i think everyone is."

Isn't it obvious? He's been conduction an experiment to see how long we'll keep pressing that lever without a reward.

And god said: Let email be pushed, not pulled.

Various comments indicates one thing,

Lot of posters have valid points, usages and benefits of having email. Valid points.

So do every communication media (Such as phone, twitter etc). Everything was created for human need and their success indicates that.

The point Jeff is trying to bring out is getting "addicted" in these communication media and lossing focus on "actual work".

Here the "actual work" represents "design, architecting, researching, programming, debugging etc.". (Serious work focused attention)

This post may not be applicable for a Sales, Marketing folks, Clerical, BPO guys etc. For them missing out a mail, sms, alert simply many not be acceptable.

Email is awesome.

Shame about the spam, limited (and variable length) attachments, and lack of guaranteed delivery, but hey, it's for the most part free, and for the most part it's pretty cool (esp if you use Google Mail). Oh, and shame about the viruses too (thanks MS)

All that and it can still snake down a 7-bit pathway, the equivalent of a path through the forest.

I think people who are going on about "who hits the send/receive button nowadays anymore??" are missing the point. Obviously nobody really does that anymore. Rather, most email clients have a task tray alert to tell you when new email arrives. However, this has just shifted the problem around: when that task tray icon flashes, you still feel tempted to go check what the new email is about. This means that instead of the variable reward being a question of "has new email come in?", it is now a question of "is the new email useful to me?". You hit a mini-jackpot when it's useful, but you waste your time (and break your train of thought) for the N other times when it's some useless bit of info.

I mentioned before (in a previous comment) that I was going to turn off my task tray email notification, which I did this morning. I definitely feel like I was less distracted at work. I will see how it goes over the next few days, but I think I might be on my way to breaking the lever-pull habit.

This was talked about by Jon Udell a few years back in his classic post "Conserve Your Keystrokes": http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/04/10/too-busy-to-blog-count-your-keystrokes/

I just realized I check this blog much more frequently than my e-mail.

A tale told by an idiot, full of sound of fury, signifying nothing.
-Macbeth

There are clearly different views on what constitutes the better medium for various kinds of communication. For professional purposes, personally I am oh-so-firmly in the e-mail camp; set aside "touchy-feely" subjects (of which there aren't officially that many, in my very geeky workplace), then I would say for just about everything else, e-mail is my tool of choice: For the freedom it normally affords me, to schedule and author a complete and accurate response.

But I have colleagues here who seem to hate e-mails that contain more than one or two lines of information, and insist that a meeting is required if the subject gets more complicated. These people cannot be convinced that e-mail can also be valuable as a documentation tool, a way to track multiple threads and items in a complex matter. These people will instead call a spontaneous meeting (or phone call) and expect participants to come up with well-considered answers to these questions, verbally, FTF, IRL, Real time. Well my brain doesn't work like that. To answer an even mildly complex technical question, I need time and quiet to check and summarize facts, and to draw conclusions or generate follow-up questions. I'm generally unable to do this while on the phone or in a meeting. And this is what most of my professional responsibility is about: Coming up with technically sound ideas and solutions. So for _my_ job, I would say nothing I know of beats e-mail as primary communication channel.

Jeff,

I'm wondering if you are feeling guilty about the success of SO. First you wrote about digital sharecroppers, and now variable-reinforcement.

Variable-reinforcement is the chain that keeps StackOverflow's sharecroppers supplying free content.

(Let me check again, maybe I'll find the question that verifies my expertise in a certain obscure domain . . . Jackpot! My life has meaning!)

I'm very thankful for SO, it has been very useful to me. And it is driven by self-gratification. But I don't think it is wrong to use the natural selfish desires to promote what is basically good.

Keep it up.

I would say that this very blog is also a Variable Reinforcement Machine. Did Jeff post something new? Did anyone answer my comment? I cannot count the times I come here and press refresh in a day just to see if there is something new. Should I stop reading this blog to improve my productivity?

But here is the catch: since I started reading your blog my productivity increased a lot! There is a lot of info here that I would not have found by myself. My programming skills are way better and my understanding of the technological world is increasing with each passing day. Even my english is better (I'm french-canadian).

My point is this: blogs, emails, phones are tools that are meant to increase productivity and facilitate communications. The way we use them is entirely up to us.

Excellent !

Thanks for this good remind.

Google Wave will be the same ...

So I should not use my second screen only to check (on "real time") my gmail and other email boxes. ;-)

It's so easy to check you email though. And read it for hours.

I think overall the message here is good and, for me at least, it applies at my organization. Depending on the project you are on you can get a *lot* of email that doesn't concern you one bit. Right now I have 3 different filters to not even allow these types of email to even grace my inbox.

Furthermore, there are a lot of people that feel every email they write they need to copy the tech lead of the project into them. This results in an overloaded tech lead (as for as email is concerned) who basically doesn't parse his email until about a day later. The result is the absolute destruction of email as a useful tool.

Personally I believe in phones. I think it is the number 1 most underutilized tool in (probably many) companies. To the people who stated they don't like getting phone calls because they like having time to respond, you either A: Need to learn more so you know what you're talking about and can respond in a timely confident manner or B: Communicate to your superior that you're so busy you can't even respond to phone calls.

I think communicating up when you've got too much to do is also one of the most underutilized skills in our field. People must think they'll get fired if they can't juggle 100 balls at a time. When really any manager worth his weight in salt will respect that they are being mature and communicating that there is just too much.

Getting work done is all about having that "perfect" amount to do. Overwhelm yourself and you'll spend all your time spinning wheels - and that applies even as tech leads, PM's and managers.

Then again, what do i know, I'm just a youngin.

You have an incomplete understanding of variable ratio/variable interval reinforcement. When you say that you have a variable ratio or interval reinforcement schedule, it means that you get the same number of reinforcers as you would with a fixed ratio or fixed interval reinforcement schedule, but the time or number of responses between each reinforcer varies.

If you assume that the time to the next email you receive is an exponentially distributed random variable with a low lambda parameter, then email would probably approximate a differential reinforcement of low response rate schedule, because regardless of when you check, the expected time to the next email is the same (1/lambda). In a true DRL schedule, if you respond too soon, the countdown until you can receive the next reinforcer is reset.

This is all very silly. My email setup checks often, and makes a small "clink" sound when I get new email. Nothing pops up or steals focus. When I'm not busy I flip over and see what's there when something arrives. When I'm in flow, or even starting to get into flow, I barely notice or don't notice at all. The email will still be there when I take a break.

And... I am not alone.

This might be your productivity problems, but it's not mine. It's not email's fault. It's not the sender's fault. It's your fault. If you want to get rid of things that lower your productivity then own your own problems. For you that might mean shutting down your email client and only checking at certain times of day, or not even installing email on a machine that you dedicate to working, and have email on a surf/email/social laptop. But I don't need to do this.

@Sebastian Dadał

you have a problem to change focus fast, don't think everybody needs 15 minutes to get back to work.

Think abut that. nearly every 15 minutes you should change possition, sit activly and so on. does that too get you out of your flow or can you only work in a room where noone is breathing?

We've known for a while that email has become rather 'broken' due to the large number of useless emails that demand our attention- spam, chain forwards, one word replies, newsletters etc. As a web developer and business person I have around 10 email accounts in active use. Must be a nightmare right? Well I have a 'plan' that is working pretty well for me:

- I have a few 'throw away' accounts used to sign up at websites, etc. These are gmail accounts using Google's fantastic spam filters.
- I'm selective about who I give my email address too- though this does not seem to stop friends from submitting my email to sites via the "share this with a friend" feature so I still get spam.
- I jack up my spam filtering as high as I can without false positives.
- All my email accounts forward copies to one single webmail account which is the only one I have to log into and check during the day. The others are downloaded to Thunderbird when I get home.
- I put a PHP script in my homepage that tells me how many new messages I have to save me from logging in when there's no new emails in there.
- I actively ask people who send me random forwards to stop it please.
- I almost never sign up for newsletters- I use RSS feeds instead.
- I try to only check my mail if I'm expecting something or have several new messages, not just one.
- I clear out my inboxes as well as I can.
- I told Facebook to stop emailing me except for new messages replies.

Thanks in big part to Gmail's filtering and my own strict protection of my addresses I have been getting very little spam lately. Most of my friends use Facebook b/c their own email addresses are so spammy. Also if you ask people to stop forwarding you kitten pictures or whatever they usually will - though I ask three times, then I block them.

So email is not too bad if you manage it right- but all this rigamarole is quite a pain in the neck. At the minimum everyone should have a personal and a work address so that you don't get to much distracting cruft to you work email. Then when you are focused on work- don't check the personal account.

Sadly though I think something needs to change soon or spam will kill off email soon.

(PS- I ordered some Coding Horror stickers a week ago but didn't get an email from you, only the PayPal confirmation. How long do these take to be mailed to Canada?)

So the time wasted on checking email will now be replaced by wasting even more time on blogging, posting on a message board, logging into Facebook and twittering.

Who's kool-aid are you drinking these days? This is really grasping at straws.

My thesis advisor has this note in regards to contacting him:

"
By design, email is delivered to me on the hour, to avoid interruptions. You may circumvent this mechanism, if necessary, by including the word "urgent" in the subject line. "

It always seemed like a good practice to make it so your mail delivery agent only let new e-mails get to you once an hour so as to prevent these sort of distractions.

I can't believe there are still people who don't have an automatic email notifier. I never waste time checking my mail, because I don't check my mail unless I have mail.

A good craftsman never blames his tools

Jeff didn't answer... sigh.

Sure he's got a stack overflow error inside his brain ;-)

Jeff must have a reason to explain why he prefers checking email manually, at variable intervals, instead of an exactly scheduled email notifier (other reason than rat's, I mean).

Perhaps Jeff is human, and he reserves the right to somtimes do some things in the least effective way (but funniest for him).

Substitute "email" for "facebook" or "codinghorror" and you've got an equally compelling post.

*sigh* codinghorror == ghost town these days.

TLDR

I sacked email almost completely about 6 months ago. If someone needs to contact me, there's the phone. I found the intermittent interruptions too much to handle.

I just setup my email to beep when there is something addressed specifically to me.

Email is an efficient form of communications. Email causes people to think before they respond. At least more so than they do in face-to-face meetings where they often run their mouth without thinking. People tend not to say any more than necessary in email. And they are careful, knowing there is a written record of what they said. They review what they have to say before they send it, which of often not the case in oral communications. Also, with email only one person can "talk" at time. Everyone has to wait for the talker to finish before they can respond. This is frequently not the case in oral conversation. People just open their mouth and let it fly whenever the urge hits them. Even if someone else is talking.

If you send the link for the Courier New 5.00 font (bundled with Windows Vista) download from Rapidshare, it will be OK?

Definitely sick of lame collegues who use email as a stage to communicate rather than picking up a phone to actually communicate. People who hide behind emails are weak.

>>>Email is an efficient form of communications. Email causes people to think before they respond

Wrong, if you think email is a primary form of communication it means you lack communication skills.

If you run your mouth without thinking, you're an unprofessional idiot.

I think you became an e-mail addict and that is the source of your problem. I check my e-mail once a day or less and don't feel any urge to do it more often.

Erm...

Jeff accidently his blog.

I love your writing...
But not about when to check my e-mail.
And please for the sake of sanity, may your next article not be about when the apropriate time is to take a stool.

Where's the coding horror?

This post has changed the way I work forever.

No longer am I a slave changed to the shackle of glancing at my taskbar for Outlook notification and instead I have freed myself and am zealously leading the way forward by evenly spreading all of my communication via facebook, twitter, myspace, text message, bebo, IRC, ICQ, MSN and my blog.

If I could find a spare 30 seconds at any point this month to nominate you for a Nobel, I would.

I used to be addicted to this blog, but the frequency of postings has helped me curb my addiction... thankfully, I still have email to keep me fully distracted at work :P

Maybe Jeff is just out of topics... Here are a few areas that could use more coverage:

- Database Programming and common problems.
- What ever happened to Borland compilers and Delphi??? I made a good living writing Delphi apps.
- Why is it so hard to find someone with critical reasoning and creative problem solving skills? Are these skills that can be taught?
- How did you jump from "Orange" to the new Captcha that "I" can't even read???

Wayne

Funny to see such an angry response from many of the people commenting here.

Have any of you tried shutting down your e-mail? For a couple hours at a time to see if you are any more productive?

E-mail pops up in your face and screams out 'I NEED ATTENTION NOW', which for most of us distracts us from what we're doing. Especially, when we think "it's just a quick reply".

This Website: The Variable Reinforcement Machine.

Variable reinforcement is one of the reasons why we like to be surprised with gifts. If you give your family, friends or customers a thoughtful gift out of the blue, it increases the value of the gift. In fact, they will probably appreciate it even more than, say, a birthday gift.

That is, as long as you can convince them there are no strings attached.

I don't ever use email, so therefore I don't ever have this problem. OK

How often do you check codinghorror to see if there's a new post?

Does checking codinghorror to see if there's a new post make you more productive or less productive?

I really REALLY agree with this post. Yet I understand the point of the people who do not. I think this is a good reference as to why there is such polarization in the comments:

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Some people's life depends on constant communication and availability. Managers, PR, sales, etc. Some other people though, really REALLY need to turn off all sources of information so that they can focus on one task at a time and get into a "flow" working state.

I think email is a great tool, but it has created a culture of immediacy thats really hard to keep up with. Used well: it's a blessing. But it really can be a detriment for productivity in some cases. :-) Checking email twice a day SHOULD be enough. If people need an answer sooner than that, they should just pick up the phone.

I find myself checking this blog hoping for something new, in much the same way.

Your posts are sounding more and more like tabloid headlines - "Boy with 3 heads born to teen mother!" "Real monster found in Loch Ness!" "email causes cancer!".

If I had written your latest blog entries in the middle of some euphoric "Aha" moment about some topic such as email being overused, I would undoubtedly regret it afterward and delete such sensationalistic drivel.

Where is the codinghorror Jeff?

I pay my DSL 50 bucks a month, so I expect new content from you.

Are you not getting paid from those 50 bucks?

New content. please. Now off to check my email.

:)

And you are right, since your last post on the blog, I've been checking constantly your blog, waiting for a reward (a new post).

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000983.html

Another story about Coding Horror, this time from me. I used to read this blog very often, I was amazed how new posts appeared almost every other day.

However, September is the wosrt month ever. Three posts! And no posts in October so far. What happened, Jeff? I hope that's not some kind of problems with your job or with your little spawned process.

All those mourning the death of the Coding Horror blog really should follow @codinghorror on Twitter. You get all the well reasoned content of an average blog post, condensed into 140 characters, without the random giant pictures. To give you some idea of what you're missing here are a couple of micro blogs from the past 24 hours:

" vs. : is shorter so it wins by default. Not that arguing semantics isn't ALL kinds of fun."

and

"the prevalence of xml for build scripts is a wartime atrocity against programmers. unbelievably difficult to read.".

Hey - it's just like checking in at Coding Horror to see if there is a new article posted. I should probably just add this to my RSS feed - but them I'm looking at that sucker every 5 minutes hoping something new pops up...

I think the issue here is a purely push vs pull situation. We don't want things shoved in our faces all the time, but it's also not productive to have to go look for new items. Not sure about the solution to this - I think that many of our systems these days have these issues. Mobile phones and IM can chime in at the worst moments, yet having to check Facebook for updates is a hassle. I think it's fun that we've arrived at a point where *this* is the sort of thing we complain about. It wasn't too long ago that even receiving an email was a miracle.

> Is this more of a friendly, social thing? Try using a social network like Twitter or Facebook.

Surely this is a joke? A friendly social conversation that (presumably) can't take place in person, and rather than vendor-independent email you recommend that these social relations should take place in a proprietary walled garden.

Twitter and Facebook are the *antithesis* of open social communication, and are a significant step backward from email.

Jeff... ever heard of e-mail filters?

First of all I have server side filters that put incoming mails into folders. One of them, the SPAM filter catches 90% of all SPAM and puts it into a SPAM folder, so I may have to deal with at most 10% of those. Why not deleting those at once? Not that I would ever look into the SPAM folder, but when I search for a certain e-mail, this search also covers the SPAM folder and if the mail accidentally ends up there, I have a chance of finding it. If the SPAM filter was deleting them immediately, it's lost. The server deletes all mails from the SPAM folder older than 30 days to keep the folder somewhat compact.

All other mails are categorized into folders according to filter criteria. E.g. is that is a mail from a friend, from a coworker, from a certain company? Personal mails from friends (usually chitchat) are strictly separated from work related mails. Also mails from certain companies (Paypal, eBay, etc.) have their own place to go. Some filter filter by from address, some by to address, some by subject (or parts of it) and some actually by certain key words found in the mail body. No filter is perfect, but my filter are more than 90% accurate. Ideally no mail should end up in the INBOX itself. If it does it basically means there is something wrong with one of my filters (that should have caught this mail) or maybe I need another filter (as there is no category for this mail and thus also no filter that puts it anywhere). So mails in my INBOX are always treated with high priority, as they mean I must modify my filters to avoid this kind of mail ends up there again in the future.

Server side filtering means I don't have to even catch my e-mails at regular intervals, they are filtered as they arrive and I will get the same filter result no matter if I connect to the IMAP server from work (with one e-mail client), from home (with another e-mail client), or via the web interface from anywhere in the world.

Now regarding interruptions, I have not told my e-mail client to turn on the red lights whenever there's an unread mail. I can have hundreds of unread mails, I don't care... that is, I don't care unless those are in specific folders. So additionally to the server side filters I have client side filters that will notify me, but again only if certain filter criteria are matched. E.g. I will not get notified because some friend as sent me the joke of the day. But I will get notified if my boss reports a problem with our software for example.

As with most communication, the problem is not the communication itself, but how you make use of it!

I argue for the subject just as you.

Since concentration is lost when we work preemptively,

it is totally not worth doing that ,

instead people should determine periodical checking of e-mails ,

For instance, i check mine one time every 3 hours which even most of

the time disappoints me with no crucial mail .

Regards

Surprised by the number of commenters that just don't get it.

inboxzero, FTW.