{"id":334,"date":"2012-01-10T21:40:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T04:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/?p=334"},"modified":"2012-01-17T21:16:18","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T04:16:18","slug":"email-is-broken-and-its-time-to-fix-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/2012\/01\/email-is-broken-and-its-time-to-fix-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Email is broken, and it’s time to fix it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your alarm goes off at 5:30 AM and you reach for your smartphone, which cheerily notifies you that overnight you received 54 emails. And you only went to bed five hours ago. After a quick glance, you reply to a couple\u00a0and get up to start the day. After arriving at the office you’ve suddenly receive another fifty, and so you take the first hour of the workday to sort through them and respond to those that you can. A 9 AM meeting cuts you short, but you continue to tap out a couple of replies during the boring bits. All throughout the day your laptop is dinging and popping up notifications about new and urgent request from colleagues to get them those numbers for the report, or to figure out where the best place is to get sushi. You receive several hundred emails throughout the day, and despite your best efforts, your unread count consistently hovers around 1,200 or so. Finally, quitting time rolls around and you head home, only to later\u00a0take an hour or two away from your family and rest in order to try and tackle a few more in the futile attempt to get down to inbox zero.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sound familiar? This is the doom loop experienced by many people, especially managers and executives who are suffering from information overload. No one is immune\u00a0to a complete glut of messages, information, reminders, and group communications. Yet the email system we employ remains generally the same as it was over 30 years ago, when email was invented. Well, believe it or not, technology has come a long way in the last 30 years, and I believe we are finally at a point when we can begin tackling this issue head-on and improve the work lives of many people, subsequently giving them more time to spend with their family and friends.<\/p>\n

Why doesn’t our email client tell us<\/em> what needs to be done in the next five minutes? Why do we still treat inboxes like massive lists of equally-weighted unique messages? Why are we not using the resources of the cloud to apply more machine learning to the conversations we have to allow us to be smarter about them? Which behaviors are bad when it comes to communicating, and which are beneficial? Though not exactly declarative of what the future will really be like, perhaps we can glean some good ideas on communication from this video:<\/p>\n