Email in daily life
Oh how I hate email. Ken posted the following to twitter:
Man, I have a crapton of email. Is it healthy to carry around this much baggage?
and
Consolidating inboxes for a Google Apps for Your Domain migration. My spam folder has 13,000 messages over the last five years!
Twitter has its place, but discussion isn’t one of them. For those didn’t have the misfortune of twitter texting them about this, here is a quick recap:
Michael Bond @kenwalker treat email like postits. Read it, delete it. Move useful information to ical, yojimbo, etc. try to keep email to 50 msgs or less
Ken Walker @mbond I get the GTD angle of keeping the inbox clean, but do you keep messages for up to a specified period of time? I mean deleted and sent items
Michael Bond @kenwalker Email is a communication tool like a phone call. Do you record and archive your phone calls? I delete sent/deleted items daily.
Ken Walker @mbond Fair point. I keep everything indexed and searchable at work, which has saved me from ti… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/yo8lkh
To be more verbose:
Email has its place, but it hasn’t evolved much since the first email message was sent. Its still a simple file that has a series of headers, a body, and possibly a mime attachment. Thats it. You can’t assign meta data to it. Searching and sorting is limited to headers, which may or may not exist depending on where it is from, and the actual content of the email. Some basic meta-data has been hacked on by adding more headers, but different email programs handle them in different ways.
Email, at a quick glance, is a great way to store a lot of information. You can sort it out into folders, based on header information, and you can search for information based on the content of the email. Apple’s Mail.app even takes it a step further and introduces smart folders. All of this is just a brute force effort to keep an aging system in place.
Please for the love of god, stop.
Read the email, if it has information that is worth saving the information is worth moving to another location. If it contains phone numbers, put it in your contact software (Address Book). If it contains dates and appointments, put it into iCal. If it contains action items/todo’s move it to your todo list (Things). If you have documents, put them on your hard drive. If you have receipts, serial numbers, notes, and anything else worth keeping drop it into Yojimbo. Then if you need to search for something later on, use Spotlight searching to find it. You have access too all the Metadata goodness then.
We live in a word where people Twitter all day long, IM each other, Blog, Spend hours cataloging their music, dvd’s, books, and games with metadata off Amazon so its ‘just right’. Their photo’s and home videos get the same treatment of not only tags but geo-tagging and linking to google maps. Yet people are content having their daily lives be completely metadata-less by keeping all of their information in email instead of moving it to specialized databases.
This is just one of my pet-peeves about email. The list goes on, including using email for the wrong reasons. Much like twitter is the wrong place to have a discussion email is the wrong place to send tweats. 2 word “thank you” or “OK” or “I’ll get right on that” emails are a complete waste. PLEASE don’t send them.
Oh, how i long for a true communication solution. 1 Address to send me tweats, emails, instant messages, SMS text messages. A nice XML Format that is easy to parse and use, with lots of future expandability, meta-data out the arse, links out to external applications (think, highlight->right click->send to) and the file system (for attachments). Threaded conversations that involve multiple people. The technology is there, its just that the world is wedded to the aging email and brute forcing new ideas into an old system that was never designed to handle what people want it to do.
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February 19th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Mike, thanks for the thoughtful response. First, we totally agree on the technology aspect. Email should be XML and database-based. It’s sad that it’s not, but not really the subject of my attention at the moment.
I’m more concerned about the long-term conversation logging aspect. Do you think it’s worth keeping conversations from, say, 2005? Or further back?
At work, keeping conversations this old has been a helpful CYA technique, but it also helps to remember conversations with people where decisions or connections were made. True, maybe something like highrisehq.com is a better place to store that info, but it’s easy to “just google” those names in gmail to bring them to mind.
I wonder, too, if a part of me ascribes value to this because they’re my “letters” — the way my daughter might go back through the archives and find out who I was (though that thought is a little scary, too). I’ve also got email on my hard drive going back to high school (which I’m tempted to load into gmail as well).
I just spoke to my sister who does the same thing; she’s got email going back to 2001 in her Yahoo account. To date, I’ve loaded my 2007 Sent and Deleted items (which I deduped and spam filtered before uploading), and I’m still only using < 5% of my storage capacity.
All that to say that it seems most people seem to be comfortable keeping all this stuff around. I heard David Allen say that he’s got “five years’ worth of email” on his laptop “just because I can.” I feel like I’m in the same boat: I can, so why not?