Five things I hate about email

Sitting down every morning to face an email inbox that never empties has prompted me to make this list. Dealing with email is Sisyphean in nature. Sisyphus was the guy whose punishment was to roll a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, eternally.

Email:

* Makes it too easy to alienate people unintentionally. This could be by dashing off an angry email in response to a slight. It could be simply miscommunication because email is written down but since it’s more informal it doesn’t have the feel of written communication. If you write a letter or a report, you choose your words carefully. But written language doesn’t have the extra communication of personal interaction: you can’t smile, frown, modulate your voice or change your body language. The words are just there, starkly on the screen. And they can be infuriating. In the office when the boss pops his head around the cubicle to discuss your project he will usually be alert to visual clues that you may not like what he is saying and adjust his message accordingly. In an email this is not possible. Unlike spoken words, written words stick: they can be re-read and re-read in a spirit of growing resentment.

* Is profoundly alienating and has changed the way we work in unhelpful ways. People in the offices next to each other send emails, instead of getting up and taking the trouble to talk. Some people send emails to colleagues sitting at a desk a few feet away. And now we sit staring at our PCs all the time instead of thinking, reading and talking.

* Damages productivity. It seems productive to be firing off emails and answering emails, filing them in elaborate sets of folders, and considering them, and saving them, and deleting them. It wastes an enormous amount of time. Much email is unnecessary and distracting. I’m not talking about spam, or the links to cute cats, but rather the stuff that could be actionable. It’s the many messages from bosses or colleagues, messages that could be dealt with at a meeting or in some other chunk of communication instead of being fired like shotgun pellets through the ether. The modern worker spends hours deciding what to do with emails that could be important, never mind the jokes and distractions. Merlin Mann of 43folders.com explains the problems of email better than anyone on his Inbox Zero site.

* Has exposed us to a flood of spam, which is direct mail on steroids, and has been a gift to an increasingly sophisticated bunch of cyber-thieves. Whether email newsletters that I unthinkingly signed up for, or advertising for a penis enlargement pill, spam quickly builds up to clog the inbox. This is despite spam filters. And not a day goes by without a 419 scam or phishing email landing in my inbox. Some of these are so obvious that only a fool would be taken in. Some are plausible, such as emails purporting to be from your bank and offering free anti-virus software, or to “upgrade your account” to avert phishing attacks!

* Has helped chain us to our work, dissolving the boundary between work and private life. The promise of email was that it would make work flexible. It has, but to our detriment, along with mobile phones. There is an expectation that emails will be answered immediately, especially with the spread of smartphones, laptops and netbooks. The iPad can only make things worse.

Some of what I have had to say about email applies to other electronic communication. FaceBook comments can also turn ugly, for example. And who knows what Twitter feeds and other social networking trends have in store for us. But for the moment email is the part of the hi-tech revolution that plagues us most.