Email overload tends to go up the more senior you get; executive level managers can easily get a few hundred incoming work-related messages a day. This is so commonplace that they don’t even stop to complain about it; they either cope with the crushing stress or they delegate their Inbox processing to an assistant.
I’ve known one glaring exception, however. I knew one senior manager, a VP of a hi-tech Fortune 500, who had a perennially near-empty inbox, and was receiving a paltry few dozen emails a day. I inquired as to how he got to this enviable state, and he was happy to share. It was quite simple, in a way: this manager simply empowered those under him to do their jobs, and insisted they NOT copy him on email they could handle without him. Rather than hoard updates and status reports he could very well do without, rather than have his people cover their behinds by copying him on everything under the sun, he kept his time and mind free and uncluttered, which allowed him to actually manage – guide, role model and mentor those below him in the organization.
Of course when I say it was simple, that is not accurate: it takes a very unusual personality to manage in this manner, and to overcome old customs and the entrenched attitudes of those around one. Only one in a hundred managers may have what it takes.
Can you be the one?
I’ve pointed out that people don’t read the emails they’re replying to… and here is one more common manifestation of this: when you send someone an email asking two or three questions, you can be almost certain the reply will only address the first one. The recipient reads your mail, hits a question, responds to it and moves to another message. Then you need to write them another message to get the other items addressed (and create more overload for both parties).
This being the universal case, there are steps you can take to defend against this tendency (besides sending each query in a separate email, which is the common and failsafe solution but exacerbates the IO problem).
- You can give the message a subject line like “THREE questions for you”.
- You can start the message with a statement of the number of queries.
- You can put each question in a separate paragraph, prefixed with “Question 1”, “Question 2”, etc.
- You can do all of the above.
Of course, you can do none of these and hope for the best… but I wouldn’t advise it!
The intent of email is to facilitate communication. Right?
So – someone mails me to ask to meet Tuesday. I send a reply:
I can’t meet Face to Face that day, so let’s do it by phone – can you do it at 3 PM?
The reply I get says:
If it’s FTF I can’t, can we do it on the phone?
This happens all the time: you explicitly write something – and your correspondent acts as if it weren’t there. Can’t they read?!
Truth is, they can read all right, but they have so many emails, so little time, and so many distractions that they only scan the message ever so quickly and react to the first thing that registers. Which results in incomplete communication, which requires more mails to resolve the mess, which increases the load… a classic runaway positive feedback loop!
One of the slides in my Information Overload lecture analyzes the root causes of sending useless email, and goes into the very human motivators stemming from mistrust in many corporate cultures. One of these is CYA – sending mail, or copying too many people on it, to cover one’s backside.
So in a recent lecture one of my audience, not being a native English speaker, raised her hand and asked what CYA meant. I translated it for her and explained how people might send mail to people who had no need for it merely to cover themselves from any objection. She immediately got it, but another attendee said he thought I had meant the CYA was for use in the subject line of the message, to indicate its true nature – like the other cues I advocate using: HOT, FYI, etc.
Obviously this is not going to happen; no one will specify that they’re sending a message for this reason. But one may dream… surely we could all benefit if it were customary and required for people who send useless mail to prefix the subject with cues like CYA, or USELESS, or BS, or DELETEME… indeed, as computers get ever more powerful, we could delegate adding the cues to the email server, based on semantic analysis of the message’s content. We already have tools analyzing messages for importance (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, or ClearContext for Outlook); why can’t they analyze them for inconsiderate, useless content?
Oh well…
I was discussing Email Overload with a friend of mine who is a veteran manager at an international hi-tech company, and he made an interesting observation. His company, he said, is large enough that many email senders have no idea who should be copied on their messages; they can’t be sure who “needs to know”, so they just CC everyone who is remotely likely to be involved. Basically, they are replacing “Need to Know” with “Might possibly need to know”.
Of course, although these folks think “better safe than sorry”, they should be very sorry – the recipients that don’t need the information are wasting time, effort and peace of mind on the useless mail they receive. They are, in effect, paying with overload for the senders’ ignorance of their actual work needs.
So what can one do? You can’t make the company smaller; but you might ensure people have access to a better mapping of coworkers’ needs and interests. With today’s Social Media platforms, this mapping is much more accessible than before. Another reason to adopt social media in the enterprise!
I was having coffee with a colleague I go back a long way with, and he told me of his first encounter with email. He had just joined Intel (in Israel) in 1988, and his boss showed him his new cubicle, his desk, and his computer, on which he demonstrated the email application. My friend came from a workplace where there was no such thing, and the following conversation ensued, more or less:
My friend: What is this for?
His boss: well, if you want to write something to someone, you write it in this window, add the person’s name on this line, and hit Send!
Friend: Oh, will I be supposed to communicate with people in the USA in performing my job?
Boss: Well, not necessarily. You can use it to communicate with people right here in our plant.
Friend: But they’re all here in this same office space, why on earth would I be sending them this email when I can talk to them?
Today, when coworkers send each other email from one cubicle to the next, this exchange would be unthinkable, yet my friend’s instinctive response is so sensible. It made me think: now it takes a serious effort to deploy a “No Email Day” program to get people to talk to each other again, but maybe back then the email addiction could have been stopped?
Ah, the innocence of youth…
An attendee at a lecture at a multinational tech company pointed out to me that part of his problem with email overload stems from situations where he is part of a functional distribution list, say “All Engineering”. Some messages to the entire group he does need, but there are other specific recurrent messages that other engineers need and he doesn’t. Then when he goes to the sender and asks to get off, he is told it can’t be done – you can’t “unsubscribe” from the list: if you’re an engineer, you are automatically included and cursed for all eternity to receive anything sent to “All Engineering”.
Now, it would be nice if the organization had communication tools that do allow unsubscribing from a list for specific types of messages; such tools can be developed and would certainly be worth the development cost. But until that happens, the issue boils down to this express or implied conversation:
Recipient: I need you to stop sending me the weekly debug report. I’m not involved in debugging.
Sender: Sorry, can’t help you there. I send it to “All Engineering”.
Recipient: Well, can’t you send it to a list of “All Engineering minus myself”?
Sender: You really mean I should craft a special dist list just for your convenience?!?!! Yeah right!
And this is where it ends, one line before the correct ending, which would add:
Recipient: Yes, I do!
This may sound presumptuous to the sender, but the recipient is right: he has every right to expect the sender go to this extra effort. It may take the sender five minutes, a small one-time effort – but it would save the recipient – possibly many of them – recurring distractions and time loss going forward. It is a reasonable request and in the best interest of the organization.
How do you react to such a demand? And, as a recipient, do you have the courage to say, Yes, I do?
I was discussing email overload with two VPs in a hi-tech company, and one of them shared the observation that he had been suffering from heavy email loads until an auspicious event happened: he had appointed a more junior person to manage part of his activity, and the overload disappeared.
Of course one hopes he had good cause to appoint the subordinate to the role, other than to ease his own Inbox nightmare; but even so, it is interesting to consider what has been talking place here. There can be a number of mechanisms at play:
- The VP had been receiving massive amounts of unimportant mail from below, which were now being deleted by the subordinate (and harming the latter’s productivity).
- The VP had been receiving massive amounts of important mail from below, which were now intercepted and handled in more timely fashion by his subordinate in the latter’s line of duty.
- The VP had been receiving massive amounts of mail from other organizations (not his own group) that were now sent directly instead to his subordinate for handling.
We could go on, but the main thing is that these scenarios differ significantly in what they tell us of the organization’s work processes. In scenario 1, the useless mail kept coming, and an expensive management resource was being used as a “human shield” to protect the VP. In scenario 2, the addition of the lower manager was causing a re-division of work in a sensible way, freeing the VP – presumably – to do other tasks. Scenario 3 tells us that the appointment was accompanied by a redefinition of workflows in the larger organization.
And then there is a possible fourth scenario, which thankfully did not happen in this case: the load on the VP could have stayed the same, while his helper would have had a similar load. This can happen if the organization is so smitten with over-communication that everyone would copy both managers, quite unnecessarily. It is an electronic version of Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. More employees – more available time to do email!
Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages.
This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of the use of these little wonders is that the quality of the interaction has suffered a good deal. This is because when you receive a message of moderate or larger size on a PC, you typically read or scan the entire body text, check out the attachments if needed, then make an informed reply. On a BlackBerry, by contrast, the tiny screen causes people to read only the top of the message, ignore the attachments, and shoot off a quick reply without having absorbed the full message with all its content and nuances. These messages, he said, are very easy to identify as being from a handheld device – they clearly transmit the fact that the sender hasn’t read the message in any depth before replying.
Of course, there is one case where this is acceptable: when the exchange is of terse one-liners, as in “Can we push the meeting to 5PM?” – “Yes“. In these cases, being able to communicate on the go is very valuable and the medium is well suited to the message. Not so with longer messages, which end up requiring further exchanges for clarification, adding to the overall information overload.
Perhaps we need a separate mailing paradigm for handheld and computer – use the handheld only without attachments and in short bursts of communication, and reserve replies to longer messages for the PC… but of course, the temptation – some say, addiction – of cleaning out one’s email in real time is too strong to allow such distinctions to catch on… 
I was giving a workshop on Information Overload and an attendee proposed that email is more effective when you precede it with a phone call. His thinking was this: if you first discuss the matter at hand on the phone, and only then send an email to confirm or flesh out details, then there will be no lack of clarity because both parties are aligned. This means less back-and-forth emails to seek clarification or correct misunderstandings.
Now, this actually makes a lot of sense, and in fact I use this system when I need to broach a subject or a request that may meet with resistance – first do the delicate introduction by phone, then promise to send materials to help the other party decide. But is it a good idea for more ordinary communications?
This may seem to many to be ineffective; a phone call can take longer than tapping out an email, so why not use the faster method? One can always pick up the phone to do damage control if the email is misunderstood. And yet, this may not take into account the total, cumulative time of the first email and the subsequent ones that may result.
What’s worse, I have no doubt that many people prefer email because they want to avoid clarity; there are many indications of the use of email to put a barrier between sender and recipient, as when someone delegates an action item or just passes it along with the hope and intent that the recipient will be stuck with it. To such people, email is a tool of choice. But to those of us who actually want to collaborate with our coworkers to the benefit of the organization or the mission we share, paving the email message’s way with a preliminary call is often the preferable choice…
What do you think?
