For several years my retirement gig involved showing knowledge workers and executives how to use little-known features of Microsoft Outlook to better manage their email and organize the large number of action items that arrive in their email inbox. Yesterday one of my former clients pointed me to a video demonstration of a new product called Hey. It appears to be an exceedingly well-conceived and well-executed email front-end that allows users to better manage and prioritize the gusher of email that most professionals receive every day.
Now that I’m retired I get only two or three dozen emails a day, a fraction of the number I received when I was working, so I don’t need Hey. But if I were still a full-time knowledge worker, I’d be all over it.
While Hey appears to mitigate many of the issues associated with a daily influx of hundreds of email messages, it cannot address what may be the most fundamental issue with email: that companies rely on it to coordinate collaboration among knowledge workers in an entirely unstructured way. And unstructured, asynchronous communication is a terrible way to coordinate complex collaboration. It overwhelms everyone involved and slows everything to a crawl.
A New Yorker article entitled “Was Email a Mistake?” by Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, nicely describes the problem and points to some possible solutions. In contrast to Hey, which arms those who are obliged to drink from the email firehose with innovative tools to keep themselves from drowning, Newport’s pitch is that companies need to provide their employees with entirely different systems to coordinate their work.
That insight may not be particularly helpful to beleaguered email users, who don’t get to choose how they collaborate with their colleagues, but it puts the problem in perspective: their email overwhelm is not a failing on their part; it’s a failing of email itself.