How do you use Email
Lately I’ve been reading through Jeff Atwood’s blog and the blog he maintains with Joel Spolsky over at StackOverflow. I am not focusing on the programing related posts as much as I am about over management of not only people but information in general. Recently Jeff Atwood wrote a blog post about how email is basically dead to him. Sure he still uses it, but it describes where e-mail fails and how some of the more social forms of communications are a lot more efficient.
Reading through this, I think most people can relate. Trying to keep that Inbox clean is a time intensive task. I find myself doing just what Jeff describes, adding more content and detail then needs to be in the e-mails, and I get a lot of e-mails like that also. Even my family now is using e-mails to communicate news in the family, pictures and updates on their kids. While it is nice to have this information, being consumed with it is overwhelming. Using micro-blogging services is a why to help cut back on some of the e-mail chatter, while using IM’s is another way to handle those quick conversations. Jeff also suggest using a blog to answer questions in e-mails. Why answer 20 e-mails separately when one blog post can handle them all. A lot of people use e-mail, thinking it is private and safe. I’m sorry to tell you, it isn’t. Go search on Microsoft e-mail and lawsuit, and you will find out what is said in e-mails isn’t private. So why treat it that why?
I find myself wanting to get away from e-mails, and that form of communication, but I also don’t have to time to follow blogs all day. We live in a very information driven society. The internet has made us more involved with everyone. We have to be in the know. Most of us enjoy sharing our information. But we, as humans, only have so much capacity. Time, resources, memory; where does everything end. It is a on-going information share.
I think things like IM, blogs, migro-blogging and wiki’s are all in our future and really have a chance of replacing e-mail. But as long as there are people who have trouble moving to new technology, old technology will stay around, almost dragging us down as we the rest of us try to move on.
