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Mark Evans: Communications 101 - some further thoughts on email

Mark Evans, Canadian B5 blogger, writes a good post on quality of communications in our hyper-connected present. I won’t re-iterate the whole thing, but in quick summary his position is that physical meetings and phone calls hold value above and beyond the email paradigm that many have come to accept as the default form of communication.

I’m one of those. I love email, for two reasons that Mark didn’t mention:

1. Contiguous conversations discontinuously: Email let’s me have a conversation when I and the other participants want to have it. I can respond to emails when it suits me, prioritizing tasks independent of the immediacy of the medium in which they reside. The way workflow works for me, this is paramount: I’m a “burst” working, functioning best in roughly 40 minute blocks of hyper-productivity. Catch me in the middle of such a block and I’ll be surly and distracted (ask my wife - sorry!). Catch me outside, and I’m cheerful, helpful, etc.
2. Paper trail: For indexing and ass-covering, email is awesome. In my blogging, I love communicating by email because it gives me a searchable index of facts that I’ve compiled in email conversations which would otherwise be scrawled in one of my frequently lost notebooks. In my day job, I love the paper trail: it keeps everyone accountable and transparent.

So - call me a ogre-ish jerk if you will, but I love email and online communications in general.

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