Too Much Email

I am not the first to observe that the death of email may have been pronounced prematurely. Though we now have a wider range of communication media available to us - SMS, messaging, twitter, social networks - email still dominates in the business setting. It is reported that for every 60 seconds there are 695,000 Facebook status updates but the same period sees 168 million emails sent. Now, even taking into account the many offers I receive of undeserved legacies from the widows of late dictators and unsolicited diagnoses of erectile dysfunction, this is a significant dominance. It is true that my children prefer Facebook as a means of communication with their peers but they understand that 'serious' communication comes by email. There may be better ways of undertaking certain kinds of communication but the pliable, open nature of email and its universality, means it can achieve things no other medium can.

My working life is dominated by email. It is the medium through which I engage in scholarship and it is my primary management tool. It is a principal source of information and provides me with what the military term 'situational awareness'. Even my interaction with web systems and social networks is mediated by email. I receive approximately 200 non-spam emails per day and I try to clear most of these within the day, using, not consistently, the 'one-touch' system recommended to me as a time management strategy. My inbox is an adjunct to my 'to do list' and embodies my work 'horizon'. I try to avoid having a scroll bar show on my inbox and ruthlessly file away email if I cannot achieve this. Once filed an item is dead, though I keep everything and search to retrieve items regularly. 'No scroll bar' has become something of an obsession, on two occasions I have bought larger screens in order to extend my horizon. My obsession drives me to answer emails on weekends and holidays. I do not access email on my phone, but this is a paltry concession because I am seldom parted from my computer or iPad. On bad days the oppressive sense of email accumulating, somewhere just out of reach, weighs down on me. I know that I am in this regard typical - the particular pattern of my email usage may be idiosyncratic but the broad shape of my 'email problem' is widely shared.

So, it occurs to me, why are the tools I have at my disposal to handle the email so poor? I use a state-of-the-art email client with a range of plugins, notably for mapping key combinations to folders and annotating emails. It provides rudimentary calendar and address book integration (though I have, in fact ceded control of my diary to my assistant). It does a reasonable job of spam filtering and I can write rules that augment this with some filters of my own, which I use for lists that I subscribe to. I have set up the ability to encrypt emails and check certificates though it is almost never required. And there, essentially, the functionality stops. My email client does very little beyond the early versions of Eudora: gone and much lamented. Put simply, for an environment so critical the support is very limited

I don't hold out much hope that human nature will change and that people will show more care and restraint in their use of email. The only hope is that we get better tools. I need an email client that helps to intelligently filter and abstract. I need to review summaries of threads that are properly organised without repetitious text. I need categorisation and some sensible means for prioritising, scheduling and bringing back items when they are relevant. I need (really) smart filing. I need much better management of attachments, integrated with versioning. I need tools that allow me to share my mail with my assistant, smartly, varying the strategy when needed. I require improved handling of mail lists. I need real calendar integration that embeds time management. I need meeting papers collected and organised, even if they are sent by different people, at different times and in different versions. I need my various other communications clients, messaging, telephony and so on integrated. If I never see another messed up HTML email it will be too soon. I would like multiple graphical views of my email box ... and all this before I start talking about support for composing emails. I could go on, but you get the gist.

It does seem strange to me that we can spend endless creative energy on fine tuning tools which are (relatively) of limited use, such as those for photo editing and so on, but when it comes to email, this most critical task, we devote minimum effort. I suspect that because email clients are considered a basic platform function, and they are just about 'good enough' (or we are habituated to their inadequacies) there is no immediate incentive to do better, if so, this is pretty depressing.

Email deserves attention. It will be with us for some time yet.