A Word on Email

Since I’ve apparently picked up a (mostly deserved) reputation as someone glacially slow to respond to email, I thought it would behoove me to provide something in the way of an explanation. Put another way, I’m going to make a bunch of excuses.

1. Volume: This is the heart of the problem. There is not a methodology in the world that can get around the fact that I simply receive too much email; a couple of hundred non-spam per day, typically. Processing that load is hugely time consuming, and frankly often of little benefit to me (what with the mass of press releases and such that I get). Like many other analyst types, I’m finding myself devoting an increasing amount of my attention to my aggregator. Given that time as so eloquently noted by Emerson is of limited supply, that attention has to come at the expense of something, and in my case the loser is email. If you read between the lines here, I’m telling you that a blog is often a better way to get my attention than an email.
2. Triage: Of the volume I receive, I try to process it as follows (list-serve email is automatically processed via some client side filters I have):
   1. Is it a quick question? If yes, answer immediately. If no, proceed to step 2
   2. Is it from a client? If yes, flag as follow up, and flag as high priority. If no, proceed to step 3
   3. Is it from someone I know? If yes, flag the same as step 2. If no, proceed to step 4
   4. Is it a request of my time? If yes, then flag as follow up. If no, proceed to step 5.
   5. Is the email short? If yes, read it. If no, proceed to step 6.
   6. Being candid, anything in this bucket is not likely to get read.

   It’s obviously not a perfect system – as my reputation demonstrates – but it’s the best I’ve come up with.

3. Processing: The above triage only serves to roughly process the incoming emails; it glosses over the actual pain of answering the messages flagged for follow up. And the pain here is considerable. Some of it is pretty much unavoidable; responding to requests for proposals, as an example, is not an easily simplified process (and I’m certainly not averse to receiving those emails ;). But there’s a lot of email that is unfairly bucketed into the queue because of the limitations of the existing systems. If you’re thinking that I’m about to complain about the scheduling hassles again, you’re a.) a remarkably astute tecosystems reader, and b.) correct. Emails pertaining to scheduling – “We’d like to set up a briefing: can you give us some available times?” – comprise better than 70% of my queued emails. Simply solving that problem, therefore, would be of immense benefit to me and the folks hoping to receive replies to their messages. It’s absurd that this is still so hard. Zimbra, I can’t switch soon enough. I need a hosting provider, stat.

Knowing all of this does little to solve your hypothetical problem (the lack of response to your email), of course, but I figure it at least explains the why. My advice for those of you seeking quick responses to scheduling questions and the like is to use IM: it’s a much more effective channel for quick interchanges. I’m SOGatRedMonk on AIM and [email protected] on Jabber – you’re more than welcome to use either one. I’m often asked whether the phone is a better channel to get me, and my reply is no. A.) I’m on the thing most of the day, and b.) when I’m not it’s because I don’t want to be.

Speaking of the phone, may I make a polite request? If you do choose to call me, as you’re welcome to do, please take advantage of the voicemail availability. There are a few PR folks that choose the “call every 30 minutes” strategy, which can be a bit irritating when I’m on a 4 hour call and my caller ID goes off every half hour from the same number.

Anyway, I hope this helps explain if not forgive some of the latency in my email dealings. I’m doing the best I can with it, and am hoping for some better tools in the days ahead.