Via a Toot by Jeff Atwood comes this thoughtful post by Tantek Çelik on how email is no longer working for him. His first reason is a biggie:

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of “To” in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually “working” on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.)

This is one reason I’m getting attracted to using Get Satisfaction as a way to expose help issues to a large group of helpers and helpees (BTW, we’re just getting started on GS — FAQs and more will be coming soon). I’m also realizing that this is why I (and Jonathan Coulton and probably you) struggle with holding up dozens of one-on-one conversations — it locks up your attention and its fruits in thousands of inaccessible alcoves. And truly, that does not and will not scale.

But, y’know, as I read Tantek’s post, alongside his “Communication Protocols” notes, I found myself returning to a pet theory that I’ve been too embarrassed to lay out in a real post. But what the heck, I’ll capture some notes and you can tell me what you think:

I suspect that email encourages people to act insane.  read more »

So I leave my desk for a couple of hours, get 10 min to process the 30 new emails that have arrived before next meeting….sound familiar?

This is the greatest tip I have found for outlook and will usually ensure your must read email is at the top of your inbox, and makes scanning the rest of the email very very easy.

Step 1. Write down the 10 or so people who’s email you really need to see quickly in order to create greatest value from your limited time i.e. your boss, his/her boss, key customers (internal/external), your significant other half etc.

Step 2.  read more »

Inbox Zero is a system and philosophy that most benefits people who are overwhelmed by a high-volume of mystery meat email. The system works because it’s stupid-simple, and the real art comes out of getting fast and ruthless at identifying requests for your time and attention that must be acknowledged or completed vs. the vast majority of stuff that needs very light attention (or can just get deleted).

But, not so fast — what if, instead, you’re receiving a high volume of easily identifiable messages? And what if your main “action” is reading, digesting, and then contributing? That’s a bit trickier, as I have learned.

Every time I give the Inbox Zero talk to a tech-heavy group — and most especially when I talk with engineers — there’s pushback on a couple issues. First, a lot of techies say they love it when everything gets routed through email, and second, they think an Inbox-Zero-type methodology isn’t particularly useful for the type of communication that they get all day long. And that’s conversations. Lots of conversations.

For many tech folks, email is the ideal and preferred way to avoid meetings and pointless flights. It’s where they discuss features, debate implementation, and argue over the best solution to a problem. And that’s how they like it. Some companies I visit with tell me they take pride in generating over 1000 person-messages each day. That’s their culture, and love it or leave it.

This doesn’t mean there’s not room for improvement, but of course it’s a valid and very real way to work.

Do stay tuned after the jump for your chance to join the conversation with comments and tips for managing conversational email, but first here’s my observations on a few patterns that seem to work for a high volume of conversation based email:  read more »

I created a screencast today about how I use OmniFocus and email. I thought it might be of interest to some of you.

You can read more about it here

I’m am trying hard to keep my address book up-to-date, and it becomes a more difficult tast as the number of entries grows rapidly.

What would be tremendously helpful is a utility, script, or else, that would email each of the people in my address book and say: “[Premade message from user]. I have your information as such [auto-fill from address book] is this still current? If not please let me know.

That’s it, I’m happy to make sure to do the data entry as email replies come back.

Thanks in advance, and please let me know if I’m being at all unclear.  read more »

After getting used to Gmail 3 years ago, I swore I’d stick to web-based email. With IMAP now available, I set it up last week in Apple’s Mail client on my desktop to integrate better with offline storage, emailing links, etc, and found myself changing my ways.  read more »

I Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I’ve been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it’s really slick.  read more »