Why Is Everyone So Bad at Email?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | Oh my, all right, what do we got here?

00:00:08.160 | Allie has a question.

00:00:10.260 | Why are norms regarding maintaining email threads

00:00:15.200 | not widespread?

00:00:18.120 | And then she goes on about like a very big frustration

00:00:20.240 | about email should be in one topic per thread

00:00:24.480 | and people at my company don't do it, et cetera, et cetera.

00:00:26.400 | I'm gonna skip those details.

00:00:29.320 | I'm gonna skip those details to get to the bigger point here

00:00:32.040 | which is a point that I really learned working on my book,

00:00:34.200 | A World Without Email,

00:00:35.600 | norms are not gonna save you from email problems.

00:00:38.860 | When I was working on that book and I would go give talks

00:00:44.360 | and I talked to executives or C-suites,

00:00:46.920 | I do this occasionally where I go talk

00:00:49.400 | to a small group of executives.

00:00:50.920 | They were so sure that email was the key

00:00:57.080 | to a productivity nirvana

00:00:58.600 | and the only thing holding them back was norms.

00:01:01.800 | We could just get some better norms

00:01:03.240 | about what should be in the subject line,

00:01:04.680 | how long you should expect for a response,

00:01:07.480 | what's appropriate in a thread or not a thread,

00:01:09.760 | CC versus BCC, then we would be in productivity nirvana.

00:01:14.040 | And the reality is that is not gonna solve the problems,

00:01:18.680 | norms is not gonna solve the problems.

00:01:21.620 | The problem is that if your primary mode of collaboration

00:01:25.720 | is through ad hoc back and forth digital messaging,

00:01:28.280 | you are gonna have a large number of messages

00:01:31.840 | arriving at unscheduled times

00:01:33.360 | that require relatively prompt responses from you

00:01:35.760 | to keep the wheels of your business rolling

00:01:37.400 | and that's gonna require

00:01:38.240 | that you send and receive emails all the time.

00:01:39.960 | And there is no norms that are gonna save you from that

00:01:42.400 | if that's the way that your business is organized.

00:01:45.440 | If this underlying what I call hyperactive

00:01:47.880 | hive mind workflow is implicitly how work gets done,

00:01:50.600 | there's nothing you can tell me

00:01:51.480 | about response time expectations,

00:01:53.080 | there's nothing you can do with subject line edits,

00:01:54.820 | there's nothing you can do about what goes into a thread

00:01:57.440 | and what doesn't that will prevent me

00:01:58.920 | from needing to check this inbox

00:02:00.520 | or this instant messenger channel again and again and again

00:02:03.280 | because there's unscheduled messages coming in

00:02:05.040 | that I have to reply to quickly

00:02:06.720 | to keep the wheels of business rolling.

00:02:10.460 | So this is a distraction.

00:02:13.140 | Again, this is you're on the Titanic deck

00:02:17.840 | and you're really upset that the people looking

00:02:21.280 | for lifeboats are messing up the deck chairs.

00:02:24.860 | You can get those deck chairs really nice.

00:02:26.740 | You can move them in a way

00:02:27.700 | so people can move around on the deck really well

00:02:29.580 | but your problem is there's not nearly enough lifeboats.

00:02:32.500 | That is the issue with trying to tackle

00:02:35.100 | email overload issues from the top down.

00:02:38.060 | So what do you have to do instead?

00:02:39.180 | Well, you read my book "A World Without Email"

00:02:40.740 | and what that will teach you is that you have to actually

00:02:43.300 | fix the underlying systems for how you collaborate.

00:02:46.340 | Instead of just allowing back and forth,

00:02:48.220 | let's just rock and roll on email be your solution,

00:02:50.460 | you have to put in bespoke explicit alternatives,

00:02:53.620 | systems for each of the different types of work you do.

00:02:57.200 | Here's where the information comes in,

00:02:58.480 | here's when and how we talk about it,

00:02:59.920 | here's where we store things,

00:03:00.940 | here's the process for getting this done.

00:03:02.480 | And you have to do that again and again and again

00:03:04.360 | for all the things you do regularly as a business.

00:03:07.020 | That's how you fix the hole that the iceberg made

00:03:09.360 | in the ship and stop it from sinking in the first place.

00:03:11.600 | It's processes and systems, not norms.

00:03:14.060 | (upbeat music)

00:03:17.540 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

Why Is Everyone So Bad at Email?

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