The essential beatfinger: Email practices for 2009

I recently sent a version of this message to the members of the group with which I work at CMU. I wanted to have a copy of it out on the public net so that I could point people to it when necessary.

As one of my new year's resolutions I am trying to use email more efficiently, and I want to let you know of the changes I am making. As you are all aware, email can be an enormous time sink, especially when you receive messages whose purpose is amorphous or poorly articulated, or messages which have no purpose at all (thus effectively spam). Since I send many messages to this list, I wanted to let you know how I am adjusting my email practices to reduce wasted time, both mine and yours. I have six points in this plan. At the end of this message I have included some thoughts and links regarding the ideas contained herein which you can read at your leisure.

Each email I send will contain exactly one concept or purpose. Reducing each email to essentially one concept possibly means a higher volume of messages, but it eliminates the aggregation of disparate concepts in the same email. Therefore, each individual email message can be organized and summarized more easily.

As a result of including only one concept per email, I will be using a newspaper model for my emails: structuring them as headline, lede, and story, and top-loading the information content. I will explicitly state the purpose of the message in the subject line, much like the headline of a newspaper article. The one or two lines of the body of the email will be the lede: a summary of the most critical information (5 Ws) and the purpose of the email. Finally, the rest of the message will contain all the necessary details.

Each email I send will have a suffix or prefix letting you know if the content is informational or if it requires action on your part. If I prepend "FYI:" to the subject line, you can know that the email contains only information of interest, no action is required on your part. If I prepend "Action:" to the subject line, then you know that the email requires some action on your part. Some messages are so short that they can fit entirely in the subject line of the email. For these, I will append "EOM" to the subject indicating "End of Message." Finally, I will add the time I estimate the email will take to read in parenthesis at the end of the subject line whenever possible.

I will prefer to use listservs as much as possible. These listservs keep a threaded archive of all the email that passes through them. By practicing points 1-3 above, these threaded archives will become a useful repository of information about a project. Secondly, all of this information will be replicated in a searchable way in everyone's local email client. Obviously, email intended for an individual should not be sent to the listserv, but I encourage others to use this resource. Some tips on listserv etiquette can be found on the internets. (note: I removed references to our group's specific listserv).

I will make every effort never to compose an HTML email in favor of plaintext (ASCII text, whatever you want to call it), because I will write in plain English. I find that modifying the format of the email by using colors, fonts, italics, etc. is a distraction and a time waster. I intend to write in clean, straightforward English so that my words capture the story I am telling. If I need particular formatting like a list, I will make it like I made the list in this email. URLs will appear in a line by themselves as opposed to inline with the rest of the text. Plaintext is a far more universal format than HTML and, since none of us are graphic designers, it can always get the job done. (note: I compose blog posts in HTML because it necessarily winds up on the web and therefore makes more sense.)

Finally, due to high workload, I am resolving to check and respond to email twice per day: once before lunch, and once around 4:00 pm, usually in EST. If you require urgent assistance, my office is REH 232 and my office phone is (412) 268.4034. Email is necessarily an asynchronous medium of communication, but attempting to make it a synchronous form of communication causes endless interruptions. Since I'm imposing this twice-daily requirement, I won't expect immediate responses via email from any of you. If I need immediate assistance, I'll contact you in the appropriate synchronous way (visit or phone call).

The previous six points capture the essence of my new email strategy. I have a few more odds and ends if you are interested at the very bottom of this message which I will follow with some links.

Odds and ends:

smime.p7s:
You may have noticed a file called "smime.p7s" attached to my emails; this is my digital signature and assuming you have a suitable email client, your email client can verify that the message wasn't spoofed and that I actually sent it. If you don't understand the previous sentence, you can safely ignore it and the smime.p7s file. The topic of email encryption is important, and I recommend taking a look at it and trying to incorporate encryption into your workflow.

responding and quoting:
I haven't yet developed a good strategy for responding to and quoting emails. Therefore, I will just include the entire message I received at the bottom of my response like I've always done. If I devise a better plan, I'll let you know.

threading:
Sometimes the point of an email thread mutates: today's discussion of a fume hood turns into tomorrow's discussion of an abstract submission. I don't have a good way of shepherding or moderating email threads to keep them from meandering; I'll let you know if I figure something out.

links: