E-Mail's Downside

	The Downside of E-Mail Sources of E-Mail Dissatisfaction Carol Anne Ogdin Founder, Deep Woods Technology, Inc.
	Abstract: There's no one thing that is the source of user's dissatisfaction with e-mail, but it's the aggregation of lots of little irritants. Here we list some of the characteristics of e-mail that many users report as problems.

	E-mail is a "Push" Medium The single biggest problem with electronic mail is the fact that we can't easily manage what we receive: What you get is determined by others, who originate messages and send them to your e-mailbox without your own action. The consequence of this is we have to sift through lots of mail messages to get to the few that are really important. Often, these are messages we're not interested in, or those that should have appeared in a better medium (e.g., in a shared database, like customer contacts). Worse, some traffic originators are like the "Boy Who Cried 'Wolf'"; we got so much mail from that person that we've got a synapse that connects seeing the name with the finger that presses the Delete key. And, if that person ever says something truly significant, we miss it. Often, these same miscreants label everything "URGENT," which serves to devalue the currency of that label.
	Urgency: In the Eye of the Originator Whether a message gets sent or not, and whether it is labeled as "Urgent" or "Important" is up to the e-mail message originator. It's not clear that that urgency or important applies to the recipient at all. I may believe it "Urgent" to hear from you whether I should proceed with a project or not; it might not be urgent or important to you at all. It is generally true that was is vitally important to us is not of quite so much importance to others. A study at Carnegie Mellon University reported that "Managers ... described the voice mail they sent as important, urgent, and helpful. The people receiving that mail, however, disagreed. They consistently rated the messages as less critical than did the person who sent them." The report quotes one manager: "I dictate instructions to others in my messages. It really burns me when the machine clicks off right in the middle..." Later, that same manager says, "What I really hate about voice mail is all the long messages that people leave me!"
	Words Are Not Enough The lowest-common denominator of e-mail is the text-only message, presented on a screen. Yet, when we want to engage in an important act of influence, we try to meet face-to-face. The contrast is striking, for the vast majority of all communication takes place in the five senses. Words, while compact and efficient, are not a particularly rich medium.
	Compose with Care As I read the volume of e-mail messages I see, both those directed to me, and those we've analyzed for clients, I'm constantly amazed at the lack of writing skills. Some messages are so inarticulate that all the recipient can do is fire back, "Can you explain what you mean?" The Author's Responsibility What most people don't yet understand is that the meaning of a communication is in how it is received, no matter how it's intended. The onus is on the author: The originator of a message needs to find ways to make it meaningful to the recipient. As Marshall McLuhan said a generation ago: "The medium is the message." If the message is important enough to send, then it is important enough to wrap in appropriate form for the recipient to perceive as a gift. Some people write for the benefit for the reader; others write for the benefit of the writer. The former put themselves figuratively in the shoes of the recipient and makes sure that the message will "make sense" when it's read. The latter don't bother, and just put the words down in the order they naturally occur, leaving interpretation to the recipient. Guess which ones elicit more effective results. These habits recur on the Subject line. A well-written Subject that motivates the recipient to open the message because it is in their self-interest is a jewel to behold...and as rare. Composing the Subject and the message for the benefit of the reader is a source of productivity leverage. When an originator sends the same message to, say, 40 people, and the writing style demands an extra 30 seconds on the part of the recipients to understand, that means a couple of minutes of saved time costs the organization 20 minutes. When each employee takes the responsibility for the meaningfulness, relevant and readability of their messages, the organization as a whole shifts in culture toward improved productivity. For more information about the different perspectives from which messages can be composed, see "Cowboys, Communicators, Collaborators...and Communities."
	Read in Haste; Repent at Leisure The implicit urgency of an e-mail message, and the sheer volume of messages some people receive, encourages them to skim rather than read the full content. Depending on their skimming skills, they may get the proper sense of the memo...or just pick out a few keywords and assume they understand the rest. In those latter cases, a response based on those assumptions further erodes the essential trust between communicators by conveying to the original author the message "wasn't worth reading." The Recipient's Responsibility While the recipient might exert the effort to understand the importance placed on that message by the originator, it is the originator who wants a response. So, it's easy for the recipient to lay all the responsibility on the sender. But, the astute e-mail correspondent uses a received message as an opportunity to burnish the relationship with the sender. By reading carefully, and responding thoughtfully, it ratifies the originator's relationship, almost irrespective of the content. And, of course, if the person who took the time to compose and send a readable, meaningful message is important to you, it's in your self-interest to attend to that relationship by placing more importance on the message, simply because it was sent.
	Limits of Length One method for encouraging people to read the entire message is to keep it short. There's a natural "one screenful" of information that some pundits suggest is appropriate...without regarding the fact that different windows have different sizes, and my e-mail "screenful" may be four lines, while yours is 20. Worse, the artificial constraint to a single "screenful" or some other arbitrarily brief message size discourages exploration of all of the relevant issues. Messages that simply propose a single course of action in the cause of brevity, for instance, short-change the recipients of necessary information to make an informed choice. Aggressive reduction of message size may, in fact, lead to faster and faster wrong decisions. On the other hand, there is the problem of reading "below the fold." When important information occurs just below the sill of the e-mail window, there's some likelihood that people will miss (or ignore) the off-screen text. Most e-mail systems provide some means of knowing the end-of-message has been reached...by not all do. An good e-mail system will inform people they've reached the end, so they'll know when they're not.
	Abuse of Attachments One of the ways that originators don't cater to the needs of recipients in the indiscriminate use of attachments. While it may be easy for the originator of a message to package up a PowerPoint or Freelance graphics presentation and attach it to an e-mail message, it costs lots of recipient time to open the message, launch the appropriate application, load the attachment into the application, and read the results. Of course, it's always possible that one or more of the important recipients doesn't have the requisite application...or doesn't know how to use it, even if installed. Worse offenses are apparent when the message conveyed on those slides, on in the word processing attachment, are a few sentences that could have been copied into the e-mail message itself. Often, we see complex attachments being used to communicate information that should have been handled in separate stages. A strategic plan that arrives, full-born, as an attachment should probably have been preceded by e-mail messages about data sources, analyses, and synthesis of key points long before a final document is produced. That makes it easier for recipients to actively participate which, after all, is the ostensible reason they're being sent the e-mail message.		.
	Lack of Interaction One of the basic benefits of e-mail is the lack of interaction: The originator can send a message when it's convenient so the recipients can be read when it's convenient for them. And, this is simultaneously a disadvantage of e-mail: The inability to interrupt, to challenge premises before conclusions are drawn, to interact with the correspondent is an inherent weakness of e-mail (and voice mail).
	Lo-Fi Some e-mail systems offer more message "fidelity" than others. In the simplest common-denominator, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) across the Internet, there just is no fidelity. Even the fonts and paragraph formatting in which the original message was composed may be lost through the sieve of Internet mail gateways. As a consequence, e-mail users have been forced into using markings like this to mean this, or _this_ to stand for this. And, they can spend lots of time inserting spaces to create columns, or risk their messages being gibberish on the receiving end. Those features have also been expanded into "emoticons" (like the smiley face, :-); for more, see "Words Are Not Enough") and obscure abbreviations (e.g., FWIW "for what its worth" or ROFL "rolling on the floor, laughing") that confuse novices. All these are an attempt to coin some way of injecting emotion or efficiency into e-mail.
	Lack of Standards The cultural norms and standards that surround e-mail are not clear for all participants, even within a single organization. For example, for some people, spelling is an important indicator of the author's competency (whether it's relevant or not is another matter). For others, spelling is irrelevant, so long as the message makes sense to the recipient. By way of analogy, consider what happens when the telephone rings: You answer, and say, "Hello," or identify yourself. In some other countries, it's the call originator's responsibility to speak first (in Japan, the caller's "Moshi, moshi." is listened for by the answerer of the call). It doesn't matter which custom is adopted, but it matters that a custom be adopted, lest some callers use one standard, and find that people they call hang up on them because they have different expectations. Because there are few cultural standards, messages may be ignored, or may have impacts different from those intended, depending on the individuals. As a consequence, there is inevitable misunderstanding or miscommunication.