Email Is Here To Stay Despite its bad rap
In The 1990s, Everyone Loved Email!
Email first came into (very limited) use in the early 1970s. The next two decades were a time before mobile phones or widespread use of telephone message machines, so it often was difficult to reach people. To circumvent those obstacles, personal computers became wildly popular in the 1990s–mainly because they allowed folks to experience the miracle of sending and receiving email.
As Internet access exploded, email became a cultural sensation. Those without an email address risked losing professional and personal credibility.
From Pleasure To Burden
Today, with so many competing messaging platforms available, it would seem that email should already be a thing of the past. –Not so. Yearly email volume is 75 trillion and rising, with over 600 million using it internationally. Since 2000, Internet use has increased more than 1000%—with online global population now reaching 3 billion people.
If email is still so widely used, why do so many people hate it?
- Email has gained a deserved reputation as a time and productivity killer, in part because most people check their email way too often (an average of 77 times a day).
- Every time we get an email, it takes over a minute to recover focus and move on with work.
- The sheer volume is overwhelming. People often use phrases like digital overload,’ ‘work-life imbalance,’ even ‘slavery’ to describe how they feel about email. At the heart of the problem is debilitating sense of lack of control.
- Studies have linked frequent email checking with higher levels of anxiety. Even more disturbing, one study found that frequent email checkers had higher levels of cortisol, the definitive chemical signature of physically damaging stress.
- Also highly stressful–regardless of whether a person initiates or responds to an important email, more often than a person might think, it needs to be composed as if it will be read in a disposition. And, worst can scenario, that can happen! Jobs and reputations have been lost because of intemperate or ill-conceived emails.
- On a personal level, incendiary email exchanges are more likely to end relationships than face-to-face arguments. Email is not an effective tool for working through differences with others.
- Though spam filters have improved in recent years, the typical person’s email inbox is a mishmash of everything from intimate correspondence to critical, time-stamped business documents. Organizing so much information requires constant work.
- Finally, When important email gets lost in cyberspace, as still happens, dire consequences can ensue.
In the balance, email still does what it was supposed to do, even better than before. Despite its many competitors, it isn’t about to disappear.
Email’s development has followed a parallel track with snail mail: At first, old-fashioned mail was directly relevant to the personal and professional lives of its recipients. Over time, however, snailmail was overtaken with junk mail, just as email, until recently, was overtaken by spam.
Email Has Improved
Though email is still widely hated, in recent years it has improved significantly. –How?
- Spam filters have greatly improved, saving us time and a lot of frustration.
- There are an increasing number of free email providers to choose, with continually improving, easy-to-use platforms.
- Email works beautifully on digital devices, downloading quickly and seamlessly over any kind of connection.
- Gmail and other email services can sort your mail into different categories; that said, prioritizing mail according to relative importance is still a work in progress.
- Email is developing greater ‘predictive-response capability,’ i.e., providing users with partially written responses to different kinds of messages.
- Email works well in tandem with social media communication platforms like Facebook and other digital communication venues.
Email Has Lots Of Competition
While email continues to be a daily reality for most of us, that’s not the case for millennials and other tech-savvy groups. Teens, for example, are much more likely to communicate via texting and real-time platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. In fact, according to a Pew study, only 6% of them were routinely exchanging emails a few years ago. Older users also like to text, but are more likely than their younger counterparts to contact friends and family via Facebook. Other popular options, favored by varied demographic groups, include Twitter, Yik Yak, Viber, Skype, HipChat, FireChat, Cryptocat and Slack.
Unfortunately, the glut of intraoffice email is still overwhelming, with 80% of it not coming from individuals but in the form of automated receipt messages, marketing newsletters, etc. Solutions will come on two fronts: an increasing use of real-time, collaborative communication platforms–AND ‘smarter’ email systems that will be better at sorting important from routine messages.
- Slack
Slack is perhaps the best-known real-time business communications platform. Its team-based design allows people to enter into and leave conversations at will, thereby enhancing efficiency, saving time and money. Other examples of email-free task collaboration tools include Trello and Basecamp.
According to several estimates, these real-time group collaboration platforms now account for over 50% of all business-client communications.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are smartphone alerts that someone, often a business entity, has sent you a message and wants you to respond immediately. Two-thirds of us now have smartphones, so unless you turn off push notifications, your phone will frequently either chime or vibrate.
Texting has desensitized us to such notifications. Consequently, many folks fail to understand that the underlying motivation of this technology is to gain immediate access to you, your phone and, ultimately, to your pocket book. With the increasing array of mobile devices, including wearables, expect still more push notifications in the future. –Personally, while I appreciate breaking weather alerts, I find most push notifications intrusive, and so turn them off.
Interestingly, Slack has introduced a ‘do not disturb’ feature, so people can access the service when convenient for them. This makes messages retrievable and non-intrusive. In other words, it makes the system more like email! –Still another reason that email is here to stay. –In the future, email may be called something else, perhaps functioning as part of an app. Still, its basic functionality will remain much the same.
