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Playing E-Mail Tag

This probably won’t bother other people, but it might make you stressed enough to take it out on yourself. Don’t try to keep your inbox open to receive e-mails immediately as they arrive. Set times each day to answer and keep yourself by those limits. It will reduce distractions and force people who want to banter to pick up the phone and call you.

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Bulky Paragraphs

People don’t read e-mails, they skim. So don’t write an eight sentence paragraph in one chunk. Here’s some guidelines:
More than six lines? Split it up.     
Important information? Make it a one-line paragraph.
Multiple pieces of important information? Make a quick bulleted list. (Like this one)

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Sending Urgent Requests through E-Mail

My guideline is that I shouldn’t send an e-mail if I need a response in less than five days. Not only do some people take days to respond to e-mails, you won’t be able to convey urgency in text. When you are on the phone or in person, you can transmit the impending need of your request, while in text you can only resort to using CAPITAL LETTERS or exclamation marks!

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 Trying to Be Clever

  Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t. The person on the other side can’t tell with what intensity or emphasis you typed the words. If anything can be ambiguous, reword it and leave it out.

And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming. A symbol can’t replace the hundreds of different varieties in voice, tone and gestures you normally use to communicate intentions.

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The use of email has definite social implications, although there isn't always agreement on what they are. Here are some views which seem to have currency in the literature:

1.     In the absence of such inter-personal communication cues as gestures, intonation, eye movement, and so forth, email communication is more easily misinterpreted than one might have predicted in the 1970's. This phenomenon added a new term, flaming, to our working vocabulary.

2.     Email can remove social distance as well as geographical distance as it suppresses status cues. This is both a blessing and a curse (see below).

3.     Email can support and sustain communities of interest.

4.     Email can be a weapon in organizational politics.

          To be sure, there is a healthy body of literature which speaks to a variety of other      social effects of email - in some cases, inconclusively. There is evidence that email communication may both produce and ameliorate anomic communication partnerships; email both contributes to and helps overcome the user's feeling of isolation; email is sometimes impersonal and sometimes not; and email may both increase and decrease sociability in communication. All of these are important areas of study, and equally beyond present purposes.

         Because of these benefits, the popularity of email soared. By some estimates, there are over 50 million email users, and that number appears to be growing by 25% per year. But this growth is not without discomfort

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Email's double-blind processing - the sender doesn't know how message is being handled and the receiver doesn't know the circumstances under which the message was sent - creates a kind of processing hierarchy at both ends according to the degree of automation applied. Sender's can personally craft the message, delegate authorship, prepare from a boilerplate, etc., while receivers can delete-without-reading, completely read without responding, skim with or without response, and so forth.

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Email is a time manager's dream come true - user's have virtually complete control over their end of the communication partnership.

-When compared to communication alternatives, email turns out to be on the low side on bandwidth, but in some contexts in makes up for the low bandwidth with its considerable velocity. This makes it especially useful for short, focussed communication and less so for lengthy diatribes.

What's is Email ?

Electronic mail has become the unexciting and mundane electronic communication medium that we love to hate. It wasn't always that way. The hate is a fairly recent emotion.

Email has been with us in one form or another since the earliest days of computer networks and bulletin board services. From inauspicious beginnings, it became one of the three "killer apps," along with Telnet and FTP, that gave the Internet its momentum. Since the early 1980's, the popularity of the Internet and that of email have been wed.

Since the 1970's, email has evolved into the communication tool of choice for information technology academics and professionals. By the 1990's, the popularity of email throughout the rest of academia and high-tech industry, established it as a communications standard within those areas as well. It appears likely that the current wave of online service providers will soon extend this standard to the rest of the network-connectable world.

As email has evolved, we have come to surprisingly sparse consensus regarding the best and worst uses of this technology, and whether the technology itself can overcome its weaknesses over time. In the paragraphs below, I'll try to summarize what seem to me to be some interesting aspects of email, particularly as it relates to the phenomenon of information overload and some thorny privacy issues.