A World Without E-Mail: Getting Our Lives Back in Synch

Earlier this year, I was chatting with a group of young people complaining about e-mail. Their view was that it wasted time. Far more effective to deal with issues in real time, using chat or VoIP. If it was important, people would call back, wouldn’t they? Their e-mail was mostly spam and impossibly long stuff they’d never get around to reading, and probably couldn’t understand without talking to someone about it anyway. So what was the point?

It is human nature to communicate through conversation in real time. This allows us to ask questions and get context quickly through interactive discussion. It is also human nature to want information just-in-time, not just-in-case. Forget your ‘FYI’, please give me ‘WYR’ (What You Requested).

The problem with both v-mail and e-mail (aside from the fact they’re asynchronous, often ill-timed, and usually devoid of context) is that they shift the power from the recipient of communications (e.g. the right to decline conversation) to the sender. We are all, of course, both senders and recipients of communications, but most of us would prefer the power to remain with the recipient. The popularity of ‘no call’ lists and our abhorrence for spam attests to this preference.

E-mail is used for a lot more than ‘conversation’ of course. Last year I described 10 situations when it was not appropriate to use e-mail. In seven of these (bad news, complex information or approvals, complicated instructions, comments on a long document, achieving consensus and discussing a new idea) a conversation is called for. In two of them (recurring information requests, recurring instructions) the communication should be embedded in the business process, instead of repeated messages. And in one (FYI communications) it makes sense to instead post the information where it can be retrieved ‘just in time’ when needed.

In that article, I suggested the only time you would need to use e-mail is to send simple requests for info, approval or instructions, or to reply to a specific request for e-mail. IM is a better vehicle than e-mail for both of these.

But we’re not going to rid the world of unnecessary e-mails by training and persuading people to use it sparingly. As long as the tool exists in its present form, and people acknowledge they have to accept e-mails, we’re not going to change anything.

What if we invented a new tool, an alternative to e-mail, that would have no inbox? The chart above suggests how it could work. Here’s a walkthrough:

1. Each of us has a calendar that we use to block out time when we’re open for conversation requests. We can specify times for discussion of specific subjects, or discussion with specific communities of people, and also ‘open’ time when we’re open to discuss anything with anyone. The rest of our calendar is ‘closed’: viewers see only that it’s private, unavailable time.
2. If we want to send someone a message, we first ask: Does it require a conversation (to be meaningful)? If it does, the tool will send us to a conversation engagement calendar. If not, the tool will allow us to send it to the recipient’s library, as a gift, to be used when and if it is of value. If it’s a recurring information request or instruction, and the answer to the question is neither, then it boots us out — this is not the tool to use for such systematic communications, which should be embedded in the related business process technology.
3. If it’s an ‘FYI’ communication, the sender indexes it (says what topic it’s about) and sends it to the recipient’s library, to be used if and when it’s useful. The sender gets an automatic acknowledgement of their ‘gift’, an instant ‘thank you’.
4. It’s now up to the recipient, whenever s/he wishes, to accept or decline this addition to her/his e-library of documents and links on her/his hard drive. The recipient can choose to automatically accept and have filed everything sent to her/him, or decline everything, or decide each time, and/or re-index these donations. The sender never knows — it’s not their business. The technology of today’s spam filters could be used to facilitate this.
5. If it’s a communication requiring conversation, the sender is logged into the recipient’s calendar and shown available slots for a conversation on that subject. If none of the slots is suitable, the sender can send an IM requesting an earlier or longer slot. It’s up to recipient to respond, or not. The ‘status’ of the recipient is ignored in this — those of you who use IM a lot know that this status means nothing.
6. If a suitable timeslot is available, the tool allows the sender to book it, indicate the topic for the conversation, pick a medium for the conversation (IM/text, voice/phone/VoIP, face to face), and attach any pre-reading that will make optimal use of people’s time during the conversation. Ideally this tool could allow multi-party conversations to be scheduled, finding times when all relevant parties are available. The tool might even be designed to have certain times of day (when, through an evolutionary process, we’d come to agree are optimal times for multi-party conversations) specifically allotted for such conversations, so, for example, a blog writer could allot a specific time the next day for anyone who was interested to converse, in real time, about the day’s post(s).
7. Regardless of what it said in the calendar, the recipient has the final say — s/he can decide to decline a request for a conversation, and a message would then be sent to the sender removing it from their calendar as well. A reschedule would likewise be accommodated by the tool.
8. At the allotted time(s), the calls would be placed automatically — no need to dial. Reminders would be sent in advance at the discretion of each calendar owner. The calls could be recorded, or not, at the discretion of the participants, and the archives sent directly to the participants’ e-libraries on their hard drives, indexed appropriately for later ‘just-in-time’ use. You could even post follow-up “to do’s” to your to do lists, blocked into future time slots in your calendar, as the conversation progressed.

This tool would not be hard to build — all of the technologies in it exist already. What is elegant about it is that it mimics our real-life behaviour in allotting our time. It is simple, intuitive, and real-time.

Imagine ending your day with nothing in your in-basket(s). Imagine beginning your day knowing exactly what conversations you are going to have with whom, so your time is organized precisely, with no phone calls or e-mails to crowd ahead of what you’d already planned to do. Imagine not having to read and listen to volumes of stuff every day just to decide what if anything needs to be done about it, now. Imagine reading what we decide we need to read, instead of what others have decided we should read.

We could start doing again what we did in the days before v-mail and e-mail — spend our time actually doing things, and in conversations learning and understanding and consulting and making informed, real-time decisions. This tool could get our lives out of the asynchronicity that these time-wasting tools have wrought, and put ourlives back in synch.