(upbeat music) Oh my, all right, what do we got here? Allie has a question. Why are norms regarding maintaining email threads not widespread? And then she goes on about like a very big frustration about email should be in one topic per thread and people at my company don't do it, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm gonna skip those details. I'm gonna skip those details to get to the bigger point here which is a point that I really learned working on my book, A World Without Email, norms are not gonna save you from email problems. When I was working on that book and I would go give talks and I talked to executives or C-suites, I do this occasionally where I go talk to a small group of executives.

They were so sure that email was the key to a productivity nirvana and the only thing holding them back was norms. We could just get some better norms about what should be in the subject line, how long you should expect for a response, what's appropriate in a thread or not a thread, CC versus BCC, then we would be in productivity nirvana.

And the reality is that is not gonna solve the problems, norms is not gonna solve the problems. The problem is that if your primary mode of collaboration is through ad hoc back and forth digital messaging, you are gonna have a large number of messages arriving at unscheduled times that require relatively prompt responses from you to keep the wheels of your business rolling and that's gonna require that you send and receive emails all the time.

And there is no norms that are gonna save you from that if that's the way that your business is organized. If this underlying what I call hyperactive hive mind workflow is implicitly how work gets done, there's nothing you can tell me about response time expectations, there's nothing you can do with subject line edits, there's nothing you can do about what goes into a thread and what doesn't that will prevent me from needing to check this inbox or this instant messenger channel again and again and again because there's unscheduled messages coming in that I have to reply to quickly to keep the wheels of business rolling.

So this is a distraction. Again, this is you're on the Titanic deck and you're really upset that the people looking for lifeboats are messing up the deck chairs. You can get those deck chairs really nice. You can move them in a way so people can move around on the deck really well but your problem is there's not nearly enough lifeboats.

That is the issue with trying to tackle email overload issues from the top down. So what do you have to do instead? Well, you read my book "A World Without Email" and what that will teach you is that you have to actually fix the underlying systems for how you collaborate.

Instead of just allowing back and forth, let's just rock and roll on email be your solution, you have to put in bespoke explicit alternatives, systems for each of the different types of work you do. Here's where the information comes in, here's when and how we talk about it, here's where we store things, here's the process for getting this done.

And you have to do that again and again and again for all the things you do regularly as a business. That's how you fix the hole that the iceberg made in the ship and stop it from sinking in the first place. It's processes and systems, not norms. (upbeat music)