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    Entries in email (38)

    Tuesday
    Jun172014

    NEEDED: The universal "Out of the Office" notifier

    I took a day off yesterday (a real day off, not that fake kind of half working/half not working but still checking email every hour kind of day).

    And since I am conscientious, I activated the requisite "Out of the Office" auto-responder on both my corporate email account, as well as on my Gmail account (where I do have lots of 'official' work-related correspondence going on as well). My OOO message basically said I was offline and if you had an 'urgent' matter that needed immediate attention to text me, otherwise I would get back to you as and when I could.

    For the most part, the strategy was successful - I did of course get a bunch of emails to both email accounts that my OOO auto-responder handled. Three people saw the OOO message and did indeed decide their issue was 'urgent' and elected to text me during the course of the day. Putting aside the fact that in the work that I do nothing is truly ever 'urgent' in strictest terms (no life or death decisions, etc.), let's just say that I had a slightly different take on the relative urgency of the items that were texted to me yesterday. But that's fine, I offered that up as a way to get in touch with me even when I was out, so it is really my bad if I truly did not want to be contacted all day.

    But what I didn't have a good way to address were the other 4 or 5 ways people seem to like to try and contact me these days. LinkedIn messages, @ messages and Direct Messages on Twitter - heck someone even sent me a Facebook message that was work-related. Aside - please do not send me a Facebook message about work. That is terrible. 

    I even got pinged with a message informing me I had a voicemail left on Google Voice. I did not even realize I had Google Voice.

    What I really wanted yesterday is a kind of universal, covering all potential ways of getting a message to me, "Out of the Office" auto-responder. So no matter if it was an email, a Tweet, even a random Google Voice (still can't figure out how that happened), anyone trying to contact me would have been informed that at least for one day, I was probably not getting back to them.

    Unless they sent me an urgent text. Then I guess I would have to. Even if it wasn't urgent.

    Have a great day!

    Tuesday
    Apr222014

    On Nobel Prizes and Email Responsiveness

    I have a 'hate-hate' relationship with email.

    No matter how much time I try to spend on email the 'task' is never completed, there is always another message that needs a response, (or the person who sent the message at least thinks it needs a response), and most responses just spawn even more messages, the digital version of the old myth of the Hydra, when cutting off one of the monster's many heads simply resulted in two more appearing in its place.

    Plus, I am bad at email. Bad in the sense that I actively try and manage the time I spend reading/sending emails so that I don't reach the end of the day with nothing really to show for it, except an endless, meandering trail of email threads. If sending/responding to email is all you do in a day, then you can never be really happy I don't think - you can never complete anything. Which is the reason, even when I am really, really busy, that I try to blog every weekday. No matter how insipid, irrelevant, and lacking in insight any given post might be, it is always done. And there is some satisfaction in that.

    Also, if you are someone reading this post that has been (persistently) trying to get my attention via email lately, you probably are nodding with understanding and also probably cursing me out under your breath. I will get back to you, I promise. I mean it. Really.

    It is from this place, that this piece caught my attention the other day. Titled, Richard Feynman Didn't Win a Nobel by Responding Promptly to E-mails, it shares some insight into how a great and successful scientist manages to stay productive and focused. One way, certainly, was by not getting bogged down or distracted by non-essential tasks, (like 90% of emails). Feynman also says 'No' a lot - basically to any request for his time and attention that takes away from his main goals - doing great science.

    From the piece:

    Feynman got away with this behavior because in research-oriented academia there’s a clear metric for judging merit: important publications. Feynman had a Nobel, so he didn’t have to be accessible.

    There’s a lot that’s scary about having success and failure in your professional life reduce down to a small number of unambiguous metrics (this is something that academics share, improbably enough, with professional athletes).

    But as Feynman’s example reminds us, there’s also something freeing about the clarity. If your professional value was objectively measured and clear, then you could more confidently sidestep actives that actively degrade your ability to do what you do well (think: constant connectivity, endless meetings, Power Point decks).

    That is a really interesting take, I think. Tying most jobs and workplaces inability to measure success unambiguously and objectively with the perceived need to spend time on those activities that 'degrade your ability to do what you do well.'

    You spend countless hours doing email and sitting in status meetings because that seems to be what you should be doing, but I bet that often it is because no one knows what it is you really should be doing.

    So the lesson from Feynman? Figure out what you do really well, and then focus on that as exclusively as you can. If you get good enough at it, and it is valuable enough to the organization, then you get to decide what other nonsense you can ignore.

    Until then, better get back to your email. Me too.

    Friday
    Mar072014

    This weekend's company culture test

    I am of (pretty) firm belief you can tell just about everything you need to know about company culture from tracking and analyzing email usage patterns, traffic levels, and response expectations.

    Sure, not all organizations, and certainly not all roles in organizations, are overly reliant on email as their primary communications, collaboration, and general project management tool, but for those that are, and I suspect that would include just about everyone reading this post, your email Inbox is largely a proxy for your 'work' in general.

    Very few initiatives actually get started without first sending an email to someone.

    Progress is communicated and monitored on those tasks in ongoing series of emails.

    Organizational structure and power dynamics are reflected in who you are 'allowed' to email, and who will or will not respond.

    You overall stress level and relative satisfaction with your job can be extrapolated from the point in time condition of your Inbox.

    Finally, you probably leave the office with a warped sense of accomplishment if, at the end of the week, you have successfully triaged all of your incoming messages, sent the necessary replies, and achieved that most elusive of states, so-called 'Inbox Zero'. You pack up shop for the week and head home, (or to Happy Hour).

    And that is when my favorite test of company culture begins, what happened to your Inbox from say, 6:00PM on a Friday up until 6:00AM on Monday. (this is what we used to call the "weekend".)

    As you enjoy whatever it is you enjoy this weekend, think about these few questions:

    Who in your company is (still) sending emails on a Friday night? On Saturday morning? Or on Sunday evening when you are clinging like grim death to your last few precious hours of downtime?

    Who is responding to weekend emails? And no, I am not talking about genuine business or customer emergencies, just 'normal' kinds of things. You know, the kinds of things you worry about on Tuesday.

    Are your management or senior leaders making a habit of tapping away message after message (always "Sent from my iPad") all weekend long while they are ostensibly watching Jr's soccer game?

    Are you checking or at least thinking about checking your work email on Saturday afternoon when, I don't know, you're supposed to have something better to do?

    Finally, when you get one of those weekend emails do you respond? Are you expected to? And if you do are you now "at work?"

    It's odd for the one piece of workplace technology that we all probably use more than any other, that we think about and really try to understand it's usage so little.

    Email is just always there. It is always on. We engage with it constantly.

    But we don't ever think about what it might tell us about the organization, the power dynamics, and most importantly, what it can tell us about the culture of an organization.

    So, are you on email this weekend or are you off?

    Have a great one no matter what you choose!

    Monday
    Jul082013

    If you want to understand work, you have to understand email

    I don't care how much your enlightened company pushes cutting-edge social collaboration tools, uses an internal social network like Yammer or similar, or even has set up Facebook or LinkedIn Groups for internal company communication and collaboration - you are still sending and receiving ridiculous amounts of email every week.

    Don't lie like you like to - you have a problem, a bad habit that manifests itself in endless email conversation threads, tapping out five word responses on your iPhone while waiting on line at Starbucks, and conversations that often include questions like 'Did you see my email?' 

    Of course she saw your email. She 'sees' every email. She's just ignoring your email.

    But that aside, for a technology, communications tool, and collaboration medium that we all use so much, we understand and attempt to analyze just how we use email. Sure, we might know how many unread messages are in our Inbox, and how often we need to delete stuff since we are always surpassing some nonsensical IT-imposed storage limit, but aside from that, we don't really think about email and how we use it to get work done all that often (if ever).

    An aside before I get to the point. If you work someplace where you are always going over your email storage limit then you need to consider working someplace else, or if you have any influence over this kind of thing, finding some new IT people that will make that problem go away. No one should ever run out of space for storing work-related email. That's it. And I won't argue with anyone on that point because you are wrong.

    Ok, back to the post.

    If you are a user for Gmail for work or even for mainly personal reasons, a new project out the MIT Media Lab can help shed some light on how you actually use Gmail. The tool called Immersion, creates a really cool visualization of your email activity, and more importantly, it helps illuminate the sub-networks and collaborative teams within. An example of the network view that Immersion creates, from my Gmail activity, is below, (and some related stats are along the right side of the post).

    Click image for an even larger view

    Immersion uses color coding, network connection links, and size/distance of the nodes to help understand with whom you are most frequently emailing, who else is likely included in those conversations, how often they occur, and the topics or projects that are being worked on.

    On my chart, I can see pretty clear delineation between messages about HRevolution, Fistful of Talent, HR Technology, as well as personal and fun stuff as well. But the key point is that the Immersion tool offers a little bit of a window into how I am actually using email - the one technology that I am still sad to say dominates many workdays.

    You probably can't leverage the Immersion tool, (yet), if you are using a corporate, MS-based email backbone. But you can put some pressure on your IT pals to find some tools and methods to help you and your organization better understand how and when and in what manner the number one collaboration technology in your organization is being used.

    They have time believe me. And make sure you tell them to quit with the 'Your mailbox is over the storage size limit emails.'

    Everyone ignores them.

    Tuesday
    Mar262013

    The most engaging method of communication you're not using

    Let me clarify the post title a little - maybe it should be 'The most engaging method of communication you're organization is not using', but I read somewhere the best titles connect with people personally, so I left the 'organization' part out.

    Two charts below will lay it all out for you. The first, courtesy of Business Insider's Chart of the Day:

    Most people read this chart with the 'big' takeaway being something like 'Wow, young adults send a ridiculous amount of text messages each month'.  But that's not the only, or I'd submit the most important bit of insight from a chart like that.

    What am I getting at? 

    Take a look at the second image - a snippet from my personal Google account activity report from last month, the section that reports back my email aggregate usage for the month. Think about what this data says (admittedly just for my, but I am betting your experience is similar), compared to the text message data above.

    The Google data shows that in the month I received almost 10x more email messages than I sent - and that is not accounting for spam and other stuff that I have filters set up for to skip my Inbox entirely - add that stuff in and I bet the ratio of emails received to sent would balloon to 20x. Email is essentially a massive ocean of noise with a tiny bit of signal mixed in, and that requires really close and dedicated attention in order to monitor.  I am in email multiple times a day, have been using it as a communications tool forever, and STILL miss or lose track of important messages more often than I care to admit.

    Mine (and yours too I bet) experience with text messaging however much more closely resembles that even received/sent ratio we see in the first chart. Look at that chart again - while absolute volumes of text messaging decline as age groups advance, there are still more texts sent than received across the spectrum. Think about that again - every age group sends more texts than they receive.

    Email is a mess - we are constantly looking for the important stuff, hoping we don't miss anything, and engaging with, at best, 10% of it in total.

    Text on the other hand is almost all signal - we read all of them, we respond to just about all of them (and usually within minutes), and we send more than we receive. It has to be the most engaging popular method of communication - and yet I bet most of us have not tried to incorporate it into organizational communications in a meaningful way.

    I'm not saying it's easy - but if you can figure out a way to get permission (bought or earned) to the SMS Inbox, the one really important Inbox people monitor - then you are playing a different game than your competition.

    They're spending time, money, and talent trying to avoid the dreaded 'Mark as spam' designation.

    Have a great week all - and please don't send me any more email.

    Just kidding. Sort of.