Tag Archive for 'email'

Five tactics to prevent your email from reaching the wrong eyes

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 3, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

In a previous post we saw that it’s all too easy for your email to find its way to people you hadn’t meant it for. So, what can you do when sending a sensitive message, to prevent such embarrassment (or worse)?

Here are some tactics to consider:

  • You can put in the message an explicit plea for discretion, such as “For your eyes only” or “DO NOT FORWARD”. You can also put “[Private]” in the subject, though that may draw the attention of hackers and people passing by an unlocked PC in the recipient’s absence. But of course, this is only a first line of defense…
  • Before hitting SEND, read through the To and CC fields carefully – make sure you’re sending to whoever you think you are. This is especially true if you’re mailing to a mixed group having people both internal and external to your company.
  • Be proactive: formulate sensitive messages as if you know they’ll leak. For instance, remove the “tail” of earlier exchanges, and then allude to it indirectly: don’t say “I agree with you that it was probably George who stole Jennifer’s wallet from her office, he always seemed dishonest to me”; say instead only “I think you’re right about what happened, and I’m not surprised, knowing the person involved”. Your correspondent will know what you mean, but if she accidentally shares your message no one else will.
  • Encrypt any really sensitive information in a file and attach it to your email. And don’t rely on Pig Latin; there are powerful encryption tools available out there!
  • And despite all that – you should always assume that sooner or later your mail will be shared with people you hadn’t intended to see it. If you can’t accept this risk at all, don’t send the message via email – period!

Lastly: you are a recipient yourself. Protect your friends and coworkers by not disclosing their messages to others, unless you’re sure they’d approve. Do unto others…

Speed vs. Thought in email communications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 23, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

Given that knowledge workers receive many more emails daily than they can possibly process, it is small wonder that some emails never get a response (the phenomenon called Online Silence, which I’ve discussed before). Indeed, the research shows that if a message isn’t replied to in a day or so, it is likely never to be answered.

There is, however, an interesting exception: messages that require an answer but also necessitate thought.

A great example are requests for LinkedIn endorsements (also known as recommendations). The way it works, in my experience, is this: Jack asks his LinkedIn contact, Jill, to provide a recommendation for him. Jill replies the next day “Glad to do it!”, but in fact does not do it that day, nor in the following week, nor, in some cases, in a month. Then, having completely forgotten about it, Jack has a nice surprise when a LinkedIn message announces that Jill has recommended him!

What is going on in this scenario is this: Jill does want to endorse Jack, since there is some degree of personal friendship between them (no one asks enemies to endorse them!). However, writing a recommendation requires some heavy mental lifting: you need to really think carefully what to write and how to phrase it to convey your exact intention. You need to clear some uninterrupted time to devote to the task, and in this age of the Soundbyte and the Blackberry this is a rare luxury indeed. So Jill puts the matter on her To Do list, but not at high urgency; this is a classic case of a task that is important but not urgent in her mind. Only after weeks have gone by does she decide to get it done, since letting it drop is not an option.

The same thing tends to happen to any email that is too important to ignore but too thought-consuming to do in one’s stride: emails whose processing involves reading long but valuable articles are another good example. Which is a shame, really, because in a sane world these thinking-related tasks would not be delayed for more than a couple of days; yet in our world we find it a real challenge to attend to them at all…

Six ways your email can reach the wrong eyes

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 18, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

One mistake people often make is assuming the emails they send are private.

All hell can break lose when an email is disclosed to unintended parties. There are many ways this can happen to a message (and Murphy’s laws will ensure it does, at the worst possible time). For instance:

  1. The recipient might forward it inappropriately. This is probably the most common occurrence. Sometimes it’s an act of pure idiocy, as when you send someone a personal comment about X and before you know it they send it to X or his colleagues. But often it’s indirect: the recipient forwards a mail containing a long thread, without noticing that somewhere down the thread is something that is best not shared with one of the list of addressees.
  2. The recipient might try to forward it appropriately, but sends it to the wrong party instead: with today’s address auto-complete feature, anything’s possible.
  3. The recipient might “outsource” its processing. This is common with managers: you send them a mail and they let their TA or admin handle it.
  4. The recipient might expose it due to lax information security, e.g. by having their PC hacked into, or losing their BlackBerry with your mail on it. For that matter, it may also be hacked into in your own machine’s Sent Items folder.
  5. The recipient might print it out on paper, then dump it – a whole world of leak opportunities there.
  6. The authorities might grab it. Any email may be subject to discovery in case of litigation. A more extreme case: when Enron collapsed in disgrace the US government grabbed the email database off its servers and made hundreds of thousands of emails publicly available (e.g. here). It’s an invaluable source of statistics for researchers of email behavior, but in the process it exposes many sensitive and personal messages.

So, what is one to do? We’ll explore in a coming post; until then, be careful what you write!

The Warm Fuzzy factor in communications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 12, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

These days I make a living helping people avoid spending all night on processing their email overload, so it was with some amusement that I remembered how I used to spend my own nights communicating with people – but enjoying every minute of it!

This was back when I was in my teens and twenties, and I had a ham radio station I’d built myself (of course). I’d stay up late at night (when shortwave reception tends to improve) trying to connect to as many other radio amateurs in distant lands as I could raise in my earphones. It was a fun hobby, and it gave me much pleasure.

Morse KeyThere are some analogies to email: I was communicating across the globe; I made contact with many people I’d never met before; and, let’s face it, much of what we said (or pounded out in Morse code) was not very interesting per se: weather conditions, equipment and antenna configurations mostly – about as fascinating as much incoming email. And yet it was fun – an adjective no one would ascribe to email.

The difference, I guess, lies with the “warm fuzzy” factor. Email at its best can be very efficient, but tends to be dry, businesslike, and soulless. Sure, there are exceptions: some emails among friends and relatives can be heart warming indeed, but these are buried under the flood of utilitarian work email and useless unsolicited messages. The radio contact we had, even when done via dots and dashes, was a very human form of contact; it was synchronous, interactive, and for a few minutes would make two remote people feel friendship. I wish email was like that…

But then, the warm fuzzy factor does exist today – in the social networks world, notably the less business oriented ones like Facebook and MySpace. I encounter many people (above high school age, anyway) that express real concern with Facebook addiction and time drain, but even these would admit they find the experience pleasing: you see your friends, exchange comments and pleasantries, and feel part of a human activity, just like radio amateurs do.

But of course, none of these Facebook users could build a radio rig – or an internet router – from scratch…  :-)

Image courtesy Anthony Catalano, shared on flickr under CC license.

Brevity is the soul of Wit… so where is the soul of Email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 8, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Individual Solutions
. 1 Comment

If Brevity is the soul of Wit (as Shakespeake has Polonius tell us), how much of this soul can we expect in the age of electronic communication?

Not much, probably. Brevity requires more investment than verbosity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Since in today’s overloaded work culture nobody has any time for anything, the tendency is to make emails longer than necessary, to the detriment of the hapless recipient.

There are three places where you see a combination of brevity and wit today. One is automobile vanity license plates: with only 7 characters to use, people get very ingenious. Another is SMS text messages, where the extreme constraints of a cellphone’s human interface, coupled with youngsters’ love of slang, lead to some gems. The third is Twitter, whose 140 character limit actually derives from SMS. Regular email, by contrast, remains high on length and low on literary wit.

The one exception, of course, is email written on handheld mobile devices: BlackBerries and other Smartphones. Typing on these devices’ tiny keyboards is hard enough to discourage long messages. The plain text messages that end in the brief sig “Written on my mobile device” are short indeed; whether they are witty – in today’s sense of “clever and humorous” or in Shakespeare’s of simply intelligent and to the point – varies a good deal, depending on the sender. At any rate, this is one redeeming feature of the BlackBerry where Information Overload is concerned: it may have wrecked our Work/Life barrier, but at least it encourages short messages that can be processed more rapidly.

I conclude with a strong recommendation: Whichever device you use for your mailing, do invest a moment in making your mail messages brief. It isn’t just a matter of Wit, or Soul: it’s that the likelihood of getting a rapid reply (or getting a reply at all) is inversely proportional to message length. Messages longer than a paragraph are that much more likely to be delegated for later reading – and that later moment may never come, with new mail coming in all the time. You have one chance at the recipient’s attention: don’t lose it by being too lazy to be brief. Throwing in some Wit, of course, is optional.

Facebook and Email Overload reduction

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 28, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

Of course Facebook can do a lot of different things for different people; and different people eye it with enthusiasm, hostility, and anything in between. Some say it can consume hours each day, and thus reduce your productivity; others say it will eventually replace email in the workplace (as it is already in process of doing in the world of Gen Y and those who want to communicate with them). We’ll see in the interesting next few years…

For my part, I find Facebook a pleasant way to keep in touch – lightly – with my friends. My personal strategy is to use LinkedIn for work-only contacts, and Facebook for people I know in person: friends and family. I don’t spend hours on it daily – more like five minutes – but it does alert me to news from my wider circle of friends: who’s had a baby, who is relocating to another land, who is vacationing where and what they saw there that they want to share… and all this in a fun, interactive way, with the full benefits of a true Social Network.

But in addition to the fun part, the migration to Facebook may have a serious role to play in getting in control of information overload. As more of this personal knowledge transfer moves to Facebook, it will stay out of the overused, abused, battered and stressful email Inbox. Most of the jokes, links and recommendations that my many friends used to send me via email in past years seem to have gone to the much less demanding Facebook update stream, where they can be consumed – or not – much less formally.


What is your experience with this?

How to avoid email mania without annoying your customers

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 18, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

Here is a question I was asked by an attendee at one of my lectures. I was teaching the importance of not using email like Instant Messenger, of reading it only a few times a day in preset slots. The guy wanted to know how can he do this, when his customers expect him to respond instantly? Won’t they be annoyed (to use a mild term)? He would prefer to suffer than to upset his customers!

He certainly had a point. In my experience if you cut your email reading just like that, cold turkey, some of your correspondents will in fact go ballistic: What? You received my email ten minutes ago and haven’t already replied!?!? Interestingly, this has nothing to do with urgency; you’ll get this response whether you’re a brain surgeon on call or a student on vacation. So what can you do?

The answer is, you don’t “Just do it”; you plan it and communicate it and make provision for the obsessive expectations of Blackberry-toting colleagues. At a minimum, if you expect an adverse reaction, you can put in your sig a blurb like: “In the interest of staying sane and productive, I only read email twice a day; I try to reply within one business day”.

That approach may placate some of your customers – after all, they have a direct interest in your staying productive for their benefit! But there will always be the slightly hyperactive types who react with “OMG, what if I need this guy urgently? What if my life/business/happiness depended on his seeing my message right away?!” For these, you need to do one more thing: provide a method to reach you immediately in urgent cases. This should be a bit more laborious than clicking “Send”, to prevent its abuse; but the customer will feel much better if they know that should they need you immediately, they won’t be frustrated.

The simplest method of doing this is to provide a cellular phone number to these people, either on a one by one basis or simply by including it in your sig. You may also need to clarify to them that they should feel free to use the phone (you’ll be surprised, but not all people feel OK with that). A more sophisticated method is provided by the elegant solution called AwayFind, which you can see here. You sign on to use it, and then you add to your sig something like “I check email twice daily; to reach me sooner, click here: https://awayfind.com/johnsmith”. Clicking the link takes your correspondent to a web form where they fill a brief message; you will be notified of this to your cellphone immediately. Away Find does a lot more than that – it allows you to configure it to alert you of incoming email that you do need to know of immediately, based on various criteria, so you too can have peace of mind while staying away from the 24×7 mail checking addiction.

So, to sum it up: read your mail in batch mode in preset slots, and give your customers, bless them, a workaround for really urgent stuff. That way you are happy and effective, and they can still get to you as needed. If they can’t accept that, maybe you picked the wrong customers?

Reading email or Understanding email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 12, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms and Individual Solutions
. 4 Comments

Considering the amount of time we all spend reading incoming email, it’s amazing how little we understand what we read.

That reading and understanding are two different things is clear; this is why legal documents use verbiage like “I confirm that I have read and understood the terms & conditions bla bla bla”… but it’s amazing how easy it is to read a mail message and totally miss large chunks of it. People glance at the message, form an impression of what it means to them, and move on – after all, they may have 100 others waiting to be read. The outcome is a degradation of communications that leads to many more messages as people try to fix the mess.

A common manifestation of this is the fact that nobody seems to respond to more than one action request per message. If the sender asks them three questions, a response to the first one is far more likely than having them all reacted to. The sender then sends an additional message to demand the remaining requests be filled, adding to the Infoglut.

There are practical implications: if you want someone to react to a number of queries or tasks, either send them in separate messages (preferable, unless they’re all related to the same matter), or put them in a clearly numbered list format, with the subject of the message stating “Three questions for you” or the like.

Another outcome of reading blindly is that people may jump to the wrong conclusion about the sender’s intent or attitude; many a gaffe has resulted from such mis-reading. It helps if you’re in the habit of delaying angry responses… what seemed as an insult at first glance may turn out to be quite appropriate once the context is clear.

And of course, you increase your chance of having your messages understood and acted on if you keep them short, clear and to the point. But that – writing a well-phrased letter – is one of those lost liberal arts…

Online Silence and Trust

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 8, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

I lectured at the Info 2010 conference this week, where we had a special track dedicated to Information Overload, with many excellent speakers. One of these was Dr. Yoram Kalman, a key contributor to IORG and a long time friend, who presented his research into Online Silence. This is the phenomenon, so familiar to us all, where you send an email to a person and no reply comes back. After a few days you get restless and resend; often this will remain of no avail. Then you phone the recipient, and perhaps leave a message urging they look for your email in their Inbox…

Yoram has been studying the Chronemics – the behavior in time – of online communications for years; the public release of the Enron email data set allowed him to quantify email behaviors in great detail, which I won’t go into here – you can find his publications on his web site. What I want to point out in this post is the basic concept of Online Silence as a real phenomenon and a major problem in the knowledge work domain.

To my mind, the major impact of Online Silence is how it undermines Trust in virtual teams. Trust is important and fragile even in collocated teams; but in our globalized world – flat in theory, but very spherical where time zones are concerned – we work in teams dispersed around the planet, and then Trust becomes even more critical – and far more fragile. Without being able to look your team mate in the eye, you have to rely to a large extent on indirect evidence of their attitude and commitment. Sending someone an email and not getting a reply certainly doesn’t help build mutual trust; but it can’t even indicate its absence. This is because the silence may indicate anything: perhaps this guy ignores you with malice, even trying to undermine your success; perhaps she saw your message and would love to reply, but she has more urgent work on her plate – not as bad as malice, but still indicative of a rather low opinion of your importance; maybe he just missed seeing your message in the deluge of incoming mail; or possibly they’ll still get to it (but don’t hold your breath – if you didn’t get an answer in a day or so, the chance is low; Yoram’s research shows that clearly).

Since all you can see is the lack of a reply, you really have no way of knowing – and that’s the worst possible state, from a trust perspective. Yet in a world where email overload is rampant, where people get more mail than they can possibly ever respond to, this is the reality. I myself sometimes try to make a “contract” with a colleague I need to collaborate with: let’s commit to always respond to each other’s emails within 24 hours. But sadly, this never seems to work for more than a short time…

I lectured at the Info 2010 conference this week, where we had a special track dedicated to Information Overload, with many excellent speakers. One of these was Dr. Yoram Kalman, a key contributor to IORG and a long time friend, who presented his research into Online Silence. This is the phenomenon, so familiar to us all, where you send an email to a person and no reply comes back. After a few days you get restless and resend; often this will remain of no avail. Then you phone the recipient, and perhaps leave a message urging they look for your email in their Inbox…

Yoram has been studying the Chronemics – the behavior in time – of online communications for years; the public release of the Enron email data set allowed him to quantify email behaviors in great detail, which I won’t go into here – you can find his publications on his web site. What I want to point out in this post is the basic concept of Online Silence as a real phenomenon and a major problem in the knowledge work domain.

The main aspect of Online Silence that I find of interest is how it undermines Trust. Trust is important and fragile even in collocated teams; but in our globalized world – flat in theory, but very spherical when time zones are concerned – we work in teams dispersed around the planet, and then Trust becomes even more critical – and far more fragile. Without being able to look your team mate in the eye, you have to rely to a large extent on indirect evidence of their attitude and commitment. Sending someone an email and not getting a reply certainly doesn’t help build mutual trust; but it can’t even indicate its absence. This is because the silence may indicate anything: perhaps this guy ignores you with malice, even trying to undermine your success; perhaps she saw your message and would love to reply, but she has more urgent work on his plate – not as bad as malice, but still indicative of a rather low opinion of your importance; maybe he just missed seeing your message in the deluge of incoming mail; or possibly they’ll still get to it (but don’t hold your breath – if you didn’t get an answer in a day or so, the chance is low; Yoram’s research shows that clearly).

Since all you can see is the lack of a reply, you really have no way of knowing – and that’s the worst possible state, from a trust perspective. Yet in a world where email overload is rampant, where people get more mail than they can possibly ever respond to, this is the reality. I myself sometimes try to make a “contract” with a colleague I need to collaborate with: let’s commit to always respond to each other’s emails within 24 hours. But sadly, this never seems to work for more than a short time…

Correspondence of yesteryear

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 27, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!