Lessons from 30 years @email

Unlike most people, I've had nearly 30 years of experience on email.  I had an email address before almost anybody because my brother Prescott was the manager of a super early Internet Service Provider called Geonet.  This would have been the late eighties.  He gave me and our other brother Evan email addresses and told us to have at it.  There was literally no one else I could email besides my brothers because I didn't know anyone else with an email address.  My bros took to it immediately and were tossing off emails several times a day.  I checked my email every month or so.  They told me that I didn't get the idea.  There are still people who don't.

By 1993 or so, maybe earlier,  I got the idea and I checked my email many times a day and dove into the first of many jobs where email became the primary mode of communication.     This would have been at my job as staff attorney for Public Citizen's Congress Watch in Washington, DC.  

Since then, I've had a lot more experience with email and have learned some things that I'll share with you:

• It is good only for communicating logistics and information such as
• When or where will something be
• What will be the agenda
• What to bring to the potluck
• What is a potluck?
• It is not good for making almost any decision
• even when or where is best done voice to voice
• all decisions except for when and where are nuanced so see below

• And it is certainly not good for anything nuanced including:
• Anything involving human emotions
• Which includes anything involving humans
• You see, on email, we may be operating in a late 20th century technological environment but we're still evolutionarily centuries older and the rapid fire of emails sends us into Flight or Fight mode and so our reptilian (or is mammalian) brains cause us to:
• Flame
• Blame
• Shame
• And most of all interpret others as flaming, blaming or shaming, whether they are or not.

• Don't waste your time creating email masterpieces
• Nobody reads emails beyond the first few lines
• So don't write a novel
• And don't expect anybody to have read it
• And certainly don't expect anybody to have looked at the attachment or clicked through to links
• Anytime you have a meeting with anybody who is a volunteer there is almost zero chance that they will have read anything you sent them
• when you have a meeting with someone you work with as a peer, there is almost zero chance that they will read it or engage with
• The only exceptions are:
• People you directly supervise
• People who are paying you a huge hourly rate for your opinion
• but even then...
• People who are retired, not overcommitted, and understand email and how to click through to things
• If someone tells you, "sorry I didn't read it, you wouldn't believe how many emails I get" that means they don't get very many emails because
• Anybody who uses email in the 21st century gets an overwhelming number of emails
• It's like saying, "you wouldn't believe how many people drive cars." 
• Yes, we would believe it.
• We exist
• If the person is under 30
• And you do not directly supervise them
• or are not their professor
• you need to send them a text to let them know they got an email
• They really don't check email--only people from the 20th century communicate by email.

All of which begs the question, has email outlived its usefulness?  This may have to be the subject of another post.  I'll just say that today, I'm wondering.   For a good laugh, read this:

The Onion: 48 Hour Internet outage Plunges Nation into Productivity