Email Is The Life Preserver That Keeps Me From Drowning In Information
April 22 2012 10:30:00 PM
Add/Read Comments [7]
The amount of information generated in the blogs, wikis, video & photo sites plus the multiple social networks I am part of, is too much to keep up with manually. Thankfully email is here to help keep me up to date with what's going on. Yes, you read that correctly. Email helps me manage information overload. In Mac's mail.app I've created a Smart Mailbox that displays the daily digests generated by several of the internal and external tools that I use and web sites that I'm a member of.
These daily digest emails enable me to quickly discover what's happening in a variety of different tools without having to manually go to each site separately. So in just a minute or two I can read about the job changes people have made, new videos vendors have uploaded, responses people have made to conversations I'm taking part in, files people are sharing with me, upcoming birthdays, etc. This is much more convenient than going to multiple sites, logging in, then reading through each site's activity stream one at a time.
Update 4/23 9:30am: Based on an online conversation with James Dellow of Dachis Group, I admit that 99% of people probably don't want to, nor should have to, create a folder or Smart Mailbox like I mention above. A much better solution would be if "daily digests" had a standard definition type that email clients, RSS feeds, dashboards, etc. could processes automatically.
That said, of course I still spend some time checking sites like Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Google+. But when I do, I don't have to process everything from scratch, as I'm already caught up on many of the things that matter to me. Also many sites now provide a visual notification of the things that I should pay attention to. These notification counters are different than the unread numbers in your email. They are not just a simple indication of new items, but instead they reference items such as responses to things you've written or mentions of your name. Click on the notification counter and you're presented with information about the posts you may want to read first. They are very convenient.
Notifications are quite popular on mobile devices and tablets, so much so that Apple has added notifications into the latest version of Mac OSX.
So am I interested in getting rid of email? Absolutely not. It's one of the most important tools I use everyday.
Its ironical that since everyone's attention is starting to shift from email to social tools, email is actually starting to feel more peaceful - moving from email overload to social media overload. All of us do need a "center" for our online lives, through which all information flows in our online life pass. It used to be email (communication, notifications, newsletter updates) and is now social media. But the "flood" aside (the medium which has more information coming to it is evidently going to be overloaded more), I think social "walls" are a vastly more efficient structure for consuming this information.
Thank you Pankaj. Can you explain why you feel "social wall"s are efficient for consuming large amounts of information. In my opinion, social is FAR better for interacting, collaborating, getting feedback from large groups, etc. but is certainly not better than email for consuming info.
Great post, Alan.
Thank you Lars.
Hi Alan, very insightful blog post and very timely, too! It's interesting to see how throughout the article you skipped, or, at least, you didn't mention it specifically the actual transformation that email is undergoing at the moment moving away from being that content repository that allows you to justify *everything* you do at work into a social messaging and notification system of content stored elsewhere.
This is exactly what I have been saying all along since I started #lawwe 4 years ago and I'm glad the world is catching up. Email for sure will always be there, to a great extent due to a couple of use cases for which it's still rather useful (1. Calendaring and Scheduling and 2. 1:1 exchanges of confidential or rather sensitive information), but it's interesting to note how email itself is becoming more of a content aggregator, a la RSS feed reader, than the traditional content repository it's been. And that is not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all, but the next natural step in the evolution of email... Go back to basics! Exactly what was designed for over 40 years ago ... What goes around, comes around, I guess, eh? :)
PS. Will be referencing this blog post on an upcoming one I'm working as part of the progress reports series I have been putting together at <a href="{ Link } A World Without Email</a>
Ohhh, quick question ... how do people keep up with the commentary over here in your blog posts? Coming back to the blog and refresh after a certain period of time, just like some of those social networking sites?
Hi Luis, thank you for the comments. I'm not sure what you mean about me skipping mentioning "notification system of content stored elsewhere" as that's what the main point of the article was!
As for next evolution of email, I hope it's what IBM is working on ala embedded experiences. Imagine if I could take action on each of the emails digests I mention above without having to go to each site. The problem is each site is going to have to evolve from just sending HTML emails to sending OpenSocial containers that email clients (Notes and hopefully others) can process.
As for keeping up with blog comments, I wish my blog had a notification system. Do you know of any way to add an "email me when people respond" function to Domino blogs?
Hi Alan, thanks much for the follow-up and for the additional comments! Much appreciated! Yes, I know! I guess I was just waiting to see some kind of verbiage along the lines of seeing how email and email clients are transforming themselves into aggregators of external content, pretty much like RSS feed readers, which is a rather interesting shift, since it is proclaiming two big items:
1. Email is alive and kicking. Thank you very much to that evolution.
2. Aggregators a la RSS feeds are critical in the Social Web, so let's stop trying to kill them, shall we? ;)
RE: IBM, yes, that's the direction we're starting to see with "Social Email" (Don't get me started on that one, just yet, please), but essentially it'll be about interacting right there on your stream and perform the actions, through email, of what you would need to do. It's coming and I just can't wait for it, too! :)
@RE: blog comments, alas I don't. I am wondering whether perhaps Steve Castledine may have done some magic with the Domino template and added it eventually. No idea, but it would surely make things much easier to keep up with the superb blogging you have been doing and the conversations that ensures from them...