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Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

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Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#31

Post by wcummings »

CydeWeys wrote: post #19
stegosaurus wrote: post #15

I actually wish e-mail were used more. I want my relatives, my spouse, my friends to use e-mail. I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though. It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever's in fashion at the moment. Any tips? Do I just have to sign up to all of the different chat apps and write bots to forward them to me or something?

My family does a great job of using mail, as well as some friends, but others are annoyingly stuck in the land of Facebook messaging. I get that it's convenient, because I have more friends on Facebook than I do friends' email addresses, but I don't like that it's such a locked-down medium. I don't even notifications on my phone about Facebook messages because I uninstalled the apps after the battery issues. Email is…

Didn't facebook used to offer email?

EDIT: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#32

Post by geofft »

marbletiles wrote: post #16
cortesoft wrote: post #6

I never mark email as read, nor do I move it out of my inbox. I have something like 800k unread emails in my inbox. However, I don't need to 'declare email bankruptcy' nor do I need to clear out my inbox.. I just don't pay any attention to the read or unread status. My inbox IS my archive. My system is this: When I check my email, I make sure I mark the most recent email as read. Then, I look back until I find the ne…

> I make sure I mark the most recent email as read. Then, I look back until I find the next email marked as read. I don't have to do any of this or have a special system. I just read my email. If an email is unread, it's unread. If it's in the inbox, it hasn't been dealt with yet. That's where the "need" comes from: it's the simplest way of achieving exactly the same result you achieve with your system.

I use basically the system described above, because I have tons of emails that I never intend to read (e.g., from mailing lists). The system of leaving them all in my inbox is simpler than having to explicitly archive them all.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#33

Post by schizoidboy »

randlet wrote: post #28
kerryfalk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is clever baiting or not. This was email with friends before MySpace.

Curious how old the OP is because I got a good chuckle out of his comment.

31 :-)

I miss the pen-pal days of emails between friends.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#34

Post by utexaspunk »

stegosaurus wrote: post #25
dopeboy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. If there was an app that could send FB messages, whatsapp, and SMS to my email where I could respond from, I'd pay for it.

To be honest for me it's all a bit odd. It's like, I just don't fit into socializing in $CURRENT_YEAR with ordinary people. I feel a bit like an old fuddy. WhatsApp has some weird thing whereby I need a smartphone and a telephone number and shit. Facebook - let's not even go there. My ideal communication feels like call > e-mail. SMS possibly as an ephemeral 'i'm outside the museum, i can see you from here' type thin…

IM's good if you're at your desk shooting the shit with your friends/coworkers. Unlike the phone, it's asynchronous, so you can reply when it's convenient. You also don't have to worry about eavesdroppers. It's better than SMS because a longer SMS ends up getting split over multiple messages and they can sometimes get stuck in the ether for a while, and you can use your keyboard instead of holding your phone and making it obvious that you're not working. It's better than e-mail because you don't want a gazillion one-sentence emails of BS going back and forth.

I generally keep email for "official" business or more thought-out messages to friends, Hangouts for more banal chit-chat, and I can always go back and search that if it turns into a more important conversation. SMS for the few weirdos who don't do Hangouts, and then voice is an absolute last resort. Real-time telecommunication just demands too much immediate attention- whomever I'm speaking to will say something that leads my mind to wander off and I'll miss a sentence or two, and then I can't go back and re-read what was said. Hate, hate, HATE calls!

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#36

Post by u801e »

schizoidboy wrote: post #20
u801e wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email, IMO, really isn't suitable for that mode of communication. Newsgroups, OTOH, were made for that type of communication. Email really should just be used for 1-on-1 communication that's not meant to be read by anyone else other than the sender and recipient.

What if it is still 1-on-1 communication; so, imagine this: I use an app to write the email, select a group or set of contacts, and the system sends out a 1-on-1 style email to each one of those contacts?

Your original premise, as I understood it, was to send a message to a group of people and possibly have people comment on it. With your new proposal, the recipients would not be able to see each other's responses.

It also will shift the burden solely to you to answer any questions or provide clarification. If recipients were able to see other recipient responses, they could do some of the work for you.

But, for all the use cases I can think of with regards to sending messages to multiple recipients, I cannot really think of a good reason to prevent recipients from seeing other recipient responses barring some communication of a personal nature.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#37

Post by ryandrake »

I'm one of those "zero inbox" people. To me, an E-mail sitting in my inbox is a distraction-- a task I potentially have to do today. My system is pretty simple: I skim through each one. If it looks like something I have to do or respond to today, I give it a red flag. If it looks like something I have to do or respond to tomorrow, I give it an orange flag. If it's a multi-person thread wherein I'm waiting for more info from someone else, I flag it yellow. Anything else gets no flag. For all of them, I archive them away after I've read them to prevent them from becoming inbox-distractions.

Then at the end of the day, I'll review my red flags and do them, review my orange flags and do the ones I can, and review my yellow flags and ping them all to remind them to respond. Seems to work decently, but I often find I end up with a lot of yellow-flagged items because other people don't have as good E-mail habits.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#38

Post by decasteve »

stegosaurus wrote: post #15

I actually wish e-mail were used more. I want my relatives, my spouse, my friends to use e-mail. I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though. It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever's in fashion at the moment. Any tips? Do I just have to sign up to all of the different chat apps and write bots to forward them to me or something?

The only solution I can see is making sure you have their email addresses and reach out to them with meaningful emails. They all still have email addresses.

One of my favourite things is reconnecting with people after time apart. With tools like Facebook, this rarely happens any more. It feels weird not to see someone for a while, then you reconnect in person and know too much about what's gone on in their lives. It takes the intimacy out of the person-to-person conversation of catching-up.

I'd rather get the yearly email update from old friends, than to track their lives voyeuristically through the web.

Re: Email Isn’t the Thing We’re Bad At

#40

Post by foxylad »

Good read. I like his point that you should read your inbox oldest first, or else you reward the most annoying correspondents. This also encourages the "handle it once" ethos, because you need to traverse older items to get to new ones.

Sadly there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Gmail to sort by ascending date - please enlighten me if there is.

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