Brett McKay of Art of Manliness says “Just Use Email”

Okay, it’s a clickbait headline. Yes, Brett did in fact say that, but he didn’t imply to use email exclusively. In a recent episode of his wildly popular podcast of 10+ years, in a moment of frustration recounting the myriad apps required of parents to receive information about their children, Brett stumbles into the truth we know inherently: that just using email would make most of our lives easier.

On his Art of Manliness June 24, 2024 episode 1,001 (not a typo), Brett interviews productivity expert Nick Sonnenberg of Leverage, an amazing consultant who help high achievers get more out of our modern (so-called) productivity tools, and author of a new book called Come Up for Air.

Readers of Just Use Email will enjoy the conversation overall. But here’s the ‘micro-rant’ of Brett’s that generated this post.

The discussion centered around using the right communication tool for the right job. Referring to the Nick’s concept of the Scavenger Hunt, in which studies show that people spend too much time hunting for information they know they have received somewhere, but can’t recall in which tool it was received( Slack thread? Email? Confluence or Google Docs comment? In a project management tool like Jira or Workday?), Brett suddenly finds himself dangerously close to the Truth.

Okay, so the Scavenger Hunt occurs when people optimize for the speed of transfers… you just want to use whatever app that you like as the fastest use. If you like texting, you’re gonna text. If you like email, you’re gonna use email.

The problem it causes, it causes people to think about where is that information?

So, instead we should be optimizing for the speed of retrieval of information.

And you see this issue of the Scavenger Hunt in your personal life, too.

I was looking at the tech stack I gotta use to manage my kids’ life and it’s getting out of control, cause every little group they belong to has their own communication app.

They’ve got like the Remind app for school, so I guess what the teachers use to, you know, tell what’s going on, so you gotta check that. There’s different apps for sports, like managing sports teams.

And the problem is there’s all sorts of different versions of these types of apps out there. And so different teams will be using a different one. Some teams might not use one of those apps. They might use GroupMe.

Then your church might have their own communications app. And like here’s an email.

So a lot of my bandwidth is being sucked up by Scavenger Hunts. Like, okay, which app do I gotta use to communicate this aspect of my child’s life?

And I’m just like, man, can you people just use email? Like, just use email. That’s all you need to use. It’s universal. We don’t need these different communication apps.

Now, to be fair, it was indeed only a moment in a much larger context and purposeful conversation. Certainly, there’s challenges in a workplace environment that differ than our personal life and that was the focus of the discussion with Nick.

They go on to talk (quite rightly) about inappropriate uses of channel-based instant messaging tools like Slack and Teams, as well as when context is not used rightly on other workplace tools.

I’d give Nick a healthy debate on the use of any tools other than email, but I will concede that most of us are not in a position to choose the tools at our workplaces, so his advice is paramount for successful efficiency in our workplaces, assuming all in an organization take his advice and follow it. (By the way, in fairness to Nick, his company’s first optimization is to focus on email and using it rightly).

There was a time when Automattic, the company behind WordPress, operated only with email and their WordPress theme called P2 (and under a reasonably-wide variety of use cases1). I don’t know if they still operate that way; I recall reading that they somewhere added an IM tool to their stack. I hope that’s not true, but if it is, I’m sure it coincided with an increase in anxiety amongst their otherwise well-centered remote staff of 400+.

I would argue that an email-only comms-based company would be just as efficient as any company with a variety of tools (due largely to everything being in one place, as well as email’s inherent superpowers).

Even for required tools, such as Jira or Google Docs, or CRMs and the like, most allow all notifications to come via email, where they can be handled with rules, as well as the ability to search across all tools universally.

I respect that Brett struggles with apps related to ‘managing’ children. It has indeed gotten out of control. At one high school I know, they decided this year to remove campus-wide announcements from the app they use for individual grades and fees, requiring parents to register for a new different app for those. (And we parents still receive text messages when things are really dire, such as unplanned lockdowns).

I have a child in another school system that has no less than five apps (both web and mobile) to manage full transparency into that child’s school-related life.

As usual, one of those apps is the dreaded ‘parents group’ app for his grade level. These are filled with the lost and wandering parents who cost the rest of us time with questions such as “Did they send out the field trip permission slip on Friday? I can’t find it.”, and “Does anyone need an extra Medium jersey we have leftover from last year?”. Because they are on the app, the messages come instantly, can’t be corralled by email-related rules, and then we must suffer through the replies of those who simply can’t help themselves: “I have an extra field permission slip form. Maybe they gave my child two? I can meet you”…. “Oh thank you. I’m saved! Yes, I’ll be at the coffee shop today after 2pm. Would that work for you?”…. “No, but I’ll also be a the game later tonight if that’s better”…. and on it goes, apparently all blissfully unaware they are committing the cardinal sin of replying to all.

I’ve been on similar parent group chats with standard apps like WhatsApp. You will (trust me) be persona non grata if you opt-out of the apps, or turn off all notifications. After you rebut their initial query (“But how will we get ahold of you?”) with was once reasonable answers like “email”, “phone”, they will eventually, almost as if they can’t wait to show the rebels how wrong they were to ignore some of their messages, find a way to stump you. You’ll be at a school function and be without some printed PDF and they’ll look at you, almost with a combined look of disdain and gleam in their eye, and say “We sent it out on the group chat last week? Are you on the group chat? Do you see the messages? I noticed you don’t ever reply to anything.”

I once exported all 1,500+ messages in a given school semester on the group app, scanned through them on a single document, and found only 3 that had any considerable merit that genuinely needed to be seen by all parents.

The question is not only “Why didn’t you send that important document by email?” but “Why would you send an important document via a communication channel that has a Signal-to-Noise ratio of less than 1%?”.

That’s the world we are being forced to live in. Pay attention to Slack or Teams because you never know when something important might come your way. Don’t you dare question the many side conversations, funny memes, company wide announcements about the meaning behind holidays (as if we were born yesterday), and the fantasy football league announcements. No, instead pay attention to all of it so that when and if we send over something truly valuable, you’ll be at the ready. At least night watchmen have no other duties while they get paid to stand at empty parking lots waiting year after year for the eventual attempted crime. The rest of us are being asked to stay alert like a watchman, but also output work as if we weren’t.

I once answered a question on Slack, replying in thread like a good boy, with the actual answer and a link to the documentation. Then I closed my laptop and went to lunch. When I returned? 65 additional comments in the thread where people went on to debate the software developer’s documentation – amongst each other but not with the software developer itself, which at least might have had a resolution – and where the conversation turned a little toasty as some began to imply that not only was the documentation wrong, but that the company was wrong to even choose that software. Needless to say, none of that discussion was I interested in. But I was “punished” by replying in the first place with an onslaught of chatter.

The lesson is almost the same lesson we teach in email: Send more email, get more email. Send less email, get less email. (Or put another way, silence is golden).

As for the first question, the answer I’m usually given as to why schools and groups don’t send important documents by email (or not exclusively by email) is because they’ve been told that “parents don’t check their email”, or that “stuff gets lost that way”.

In other words, it’s a culture war. The busybody, frenetic texting, phone-watching, highly-distracted, anxious-riddled adults are winning. Their poor information management skills force them to rely on constant notifications from whatever apps they install and to which they nearly-instantly read or reply, never batch-processing anything in their life.

And they are perfectly fine with it. Oh, they might complain the way some people complain about the weather: “It’s colder than I thought it would be today”, but still not returning home to get a sweater.

And the systems which these types are involved in (jobs, school, groups, clubs) are kowtowing to them more each year. In fact, often those very same systems are run by the same types. It is, to them, unthinkable that anyone would “go rogue” and not have a smartphone lighting up their face 200+ times a day. They see well-managed, calm, distraction-free people (or those trying to be) as cabin-dwelling off-grid and out-of-touch people who are “missing out” on how “easy” life is if you just let everyone and everything ping you with every update.

Meanwhile, those of us who want peaceful information management in our lives are losing. The fact that we are capable of managing our inboxes, of making rules and sorting our email, of following-up on needed actions, and yet doing so only once or twice a day at work, possibly less in our personal lives, is largely irrelevant.

We are the true drivers, capable of determining what gear a car should be in and knowing it’s preferable for us to do so. And like the stick shift, we are going the way of the dinosaur.

We are happy to “just use email”. We know it’s more peaceful, that life (and work) is better managed that way, that having one tool mastered well beats five tools mastered poorly.

We might even have conspiratorial thinking at this point: are the makers of these 1000s of so-called productivity and communication tools mere minions of a global design by elitist cabals that seek to enslave us in a never-ending distraction mindset and reduce profitability of companies and demolish family cohesiveness? Even our work and productivity tools have the random dopamine damaging output of modern social media. (I might add it’s no surprise to such theorists that almost all these tools are proprietary, not open source, nor based on common internet/digital standards).

It may be time for a revolution of sorts. If family men like Brett McKay who run simple businesses are expressing frustration with the time suck these “tools” are having upon our so-called modern lives, maybe we need to rise to the occasion.

We already have the super tool that solves nearly all problems. We know that the wild and speculative claims that so-called “email alternatives” purport serve to add only another layer of complexity to our lives, to add yet-another-interface to learn, and create their own unique problems instead of ones common to universal tools.

What we need is to acknowledge the war being waged upon good people, good families, and good business, even if it’s done so with altruistic reasoning. We must begin saying No to these extraneous tools. We have the super alternative: email.

What we need now is the backbone to fight. And we need to teach those around us to learn (once again, as everyone knew prior to 1995) how to properly master and use email.

Email is not just a message you receive. It’s a way to digitally manage all information in your life.

  1. https://wordpress.com/blog/2022/02/23/10-ways-to-avoid-unnecessary-meetings-with-asynchronous-p2s/ ↩︎

A JustUseEmail Update

Hello friends of Email,

Busyness has kept me from my love of email and this website. In this last half of 2024 and beyond, I intend to post much more frequently. But first, a few updates about this website on the topics of Website Statistic Tracking, Email News Roundups, Rotting Decay of Email Haters, and Authenticity in Writing; Keeping the Hope Alive.


Website Statistic Tracking

First, I have removed JetPack from WordPress from the backend. Why was I using JetPack? Ease of use (it’s got some good features) and my distaste for Google Analytics as a tool from a company that consumes too much of our browsing habits for its own profitability.

However, as much as I love WordPress the open-source software and the community that surrounds it (check out the new and improved https://learn.wordpress.org, as an example), I’ve had a sour taste in my mouth about some of WordPress the Company (run by Automattic) and its commercial offerings. I totally get the profit needs of Automattic and I don’t blame them at all, but they’ve gone all-pro and left little to the “little guy”.

First, their prices are per website and they aren’t competitive with much of the mid-to-low tier of blogs and websites. I once built websites for small businesses and I don’t know too many of those “mom and pop” shops that would pay for the range of suggested services that WordPress Corporate says one should have on their WordPress site. $5/month for “security”, $5/month for “scanning”, $5/month for Akimset anti-spam, $8.25/month for “search” (??), and now $8.33/month for statistics. Those are annually-based prices and JetPack lets you combine services for less. JetPack admittedly has a free tier if you don’t offer paid services or products (honesty policy, it seems).

Second, JetPack has, in its own way, hoovered up our collective data so that WordPress the company can learn about our visitors’ web surfing habits. What it does with that, I don’t know, nor am I assuming ill intent on their part. But it’s enough to make me and others leery.

Third, JetPack is a plugin beast. It’s the largest plugin in most WordPress installs and consumes the most hooks, data, and so forth.

Fourth, one of its key features is the use of a CDN. Frankly, I think CDNs are overrated, add unnecessary complexity to the internet, centralize control with other data brokers, and more. The promise is that a visitor from Taiwan will see an image a bit faster with a CDN than they would by having to grab it from my actual server somewhere in North America. I just don’t care. While the implementation of a CDN can be quite easy with a service like JetPack, complexity lives underneath the hood. For a high-powered web app, like Facebook or Jira, I can understand why big corporations use CDNs to considerably improve experience. But for blogs and basic business websites? Overkill.

Lastly, why even track statistics? For me, it’s mostly a sanity check if it’s been quiet in my email inbox for a while. It’s a “nice to see” but not a “need to see”. If I were to get pummeled with traffic, I probably wouldn’t know it unless my email inbox also started to fill up, or comments increased. When I once was briefly high up in the Hacker News website, I didn’t really know, but my stats told me where the traffic was coming from.

I’ve often told businesses (that spend tons of resources tracking their so-called marketing efforts) that stats are mostly a “justify my job” game for marketing teams. The marketing team wants to show that the latest campaign increased the traffic to the website by millions of views. But unless that higher traffic converts to actual sales, it’s meaningless hype.

Same with my small corner of the internet here at JustUseEmail. If I hear from more people, I suppose that’s one way of measuring success. But that could come because I wrote a more engaging article that impacted 10 of the 50 visitors to it. Or it could be because Hacker News inflamed the passions of some trolls and so I got 10 comments and 5,000 visitors. For me, honestly, the first is preferable, so the bar graphs in statistics are, relatively speaking, a bit of a fireworks show: lots of boom and pops, but no actual explosions on earth impacting wins and losses.

I decided to revisit Google Analytics. After deciding to drop JetPack from my WordPress installation, I should have known better to see what the Google gang was up to. Not only have they pretty much gone full-commercial, they pretty much tell you upfront they cater to businesses now. Sure, you can use it for your tiny blog somewhere, but why? Also, I just couldn’t justify the privacy invasion on my readers. (I should add that Google Analytics the JavaScript is easy to install, but good luck making much sense of their reports these days).

My next visit was to my host’s built-in stats. I’m a big fan of AWStats. It analyzes your server’s Apache logs and is written in that stalwart beauty, Perl. Like any server log analyzer, it doesn’t rely upon JavaScript. So not only does it not require any computing power of your machine, my dear visitor, it also is 100% accurate, since even those few visitors without JavaScript enabled are still logged by Apache for their GET requests.

However, it turns out my current host, Dreamhost, decided to implement their own web stats system which is, to say the least, convoluted. Of course it is. They’ve all but killed cPanel, because cPanel got too greedy for many big hosts. They have their own self-created install tools and systems which, while workable and okay, are just one host’s way of managing their clients’ websites.

Want to switch to someone else? You’ll have to relearn everything from FTP and MySQL setups, to SSL Certs, to even stats. At one point in time, nearly every Linux web host used WHM and cPanel. I even managed my own WHM for a number of years. What you learned there applied everywhere. Now every host is in a rush to make their own WordPress installer and scheme up marketing buzz about it, as if WordPress’s own famous 5-minute installation was too arduous for the admins. (Admittedly, WordPress seems to have abandoned the slogan of their 5-minute installation and now seems to steer installers to hosts that have pre-built installers… sigh… of course they did).

Much like the mass of communication tools attempting to replace email, despite email’s obvious superiority, we have the same tomfoolery in the web hosting space.

For now, I’ve discovered a wonderful tool called Independent Analytics. I must recommend them for those that need a quick solution that’s built right into WordPress (as a plugin). One-click install into your WordPress site and you’re off to the races. All the stats are just stored right into your WordPress database and can be backed up with it. As of this writing, their paid plan (thank you – only one paid plan, not some fake “most popular” plan of 3) is only $54/year and looks to be well worth it for those that need to track campaigns, form submission tracking (this looks interesting to me, but I need some forms!), and, wait for it… email reports!

That’s right. They send your stat reports by email. Not Slack, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, or even IRC. By email! Imagine that. The two developers (Ben Sibley and Andrew Mead) were probably sitting around going, “Maybe people would like our software to be proactive and send WordPress administrators reports about their website statistics. I wonder what system we should use to send them? FedEx? AOL Chat? Slack?” and then probably deep in their souls they heard a truth bubbling up. Just Use Email. Well, at least to start!

The interface is oh-so-clean and blazing fast. I would imagine on highly-trafficked websites that the additional database write on visits might slightly slow the traffic. Problems I’d like to have. Meanwhile, give Independent Analytics a visit and see if they can’t solve some problems for you. (And no, they aren’t paying me to say this, or even know about this post).

Meanwhile, I’d love to find a reliable and hosting provider that is (a) privacy-focused, (b) offers multi-site hosting at a fair cost, (c) uses cPanel/WHM or a close approximate, and (d) is located in a country that is not hostile to the U.S., but is not too friendly to the U.S. either.

Seems like if I find hosting providers in Switzerland or Europe, they think they are better than the U.S. and act arrogantly so. Let’s all be friends here, folks. You’re using technology the U.S. built, established, and forged long before you bought your first Linux server, so don’t get all big for your britches just because the U.S. and some countries are part of 5-eyes or similar. Have some respect for the work that was done before.


Email News Roundups

In the past, I would post roundups of little blurbs about email news and I’d do it in a roundup of 5-8 articles at a time, often making small comments. My thinking was that no one wanted to get their feed reader pinged with just one article link and a paragraph or two from me about it. So, I’d save them up.

I’ve got probably 100 saved at the moment (not all worthy of publication). I’m looking for suggestions on the best way to do this. I’d like to share them sooner than later (especially when the link is recently published and ‘hot’), but I don’t want to clog up JustUseEmail with hundreds of one and two paragraph articles.

My understanding is I could create a category called “Email News” and there would be a separate RSS feed for that, and just categorize those link blurbs there. Still, I believe the main feed would still capture those, unless I get into some custom plugin. I certainly could set the main page to exclude Email News articles and have a separate page for them on JustUseEmail. The UI would be fine, but the RSS feed would get bloated or busy. I’d love to hear suggestions.


Rotting Decay of Email Haters

I’ve noticed a trend and I won’t call out anyone on this (yet). When some loon publishes an anti-email screed, and I link to it, usually in an effort to debunk their childish communication notions, it sometimes disappears off the internet.

I’m not saying it’s out of public humiliation that it disappears. It could be typical link rot, or it could be that it was published on a blog, then later republished on one of those Medium or Substack platforms, then later moved form those platforms, and never found its way back onto the original blog. Or if it did, I can’t find it.

I don’t know what to do about this quite yet. It’s not a problem, per se, but it does make my commentary tricky to read if my reader visits the original article link only to find it AWOL. I have a link checking bot that tells me such glum news, so I do my best to update links when possible.

Sometimes craziness disappears off the internet. Perhaps that’s a good thing and I shouldn’t complain. I thought about saving the original article as a PDF and posting to JustUseEmail under my commentary, but even if that’s legal (and I don’t know that it is), why perpetuate someone finding it via a web search and reading malformed ideology. If it’s gone, it’s gone.

For now, I intend to leave up my commentary, though. At the least, I hope it’ll deter the original author from reposting their email hatred elsewhere.


Authenticity in Writing; Keeping the Hope Alive

Lastly, I hope to be a bit more authentic in my writing. While my original hope for writing many dozens of articles still occupies no small headspace of mine, and there is certainly a need for technical articles on the topic of email, I also hope to transmogrify JustUseEmail to a slightly more broad topic of technology abuse we are all suffering under. I did that slightly above as I ranted about JetPack.

I also hope to write in a more friendly voice, use less hyperlinks in my writing (as I find those distracting – and hope to figure out how to easily use footnotes1 for most of them), and to help keep the hope alive. Let me say something about that last part.

I quoted C.S. Lewis in my last post, How deliberate are your relationships?. The smaller part of that quote, and perhaps the most frequently heard part, is the portion that reads, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'”

Many of the emails I’ve received from great people all over the world have a flair that reminds me of that Lewis quote. Perhaps I’m exaggerating what I read in those emails, but I get the distinct feeling that there are many others burdened, frustrated, or just plain tired of the technology slog foisted upon us at work and in our personal lives.

Part of those feelings seem to stem from the epidemic of tools we must navigate to accomplish even simple tasks. I sometimes get the impression that those of us who feel we’ve been unwittingly enslaved to convoluted and reckless communication tools, among other sad software choices, are living in silos, without much voice, their opinions long since smashed by the Decision Makers around them.

I have no illusions here. Email has won. Email is winning each day. Email will rule over all its current crop of competitors. Still, sometimes I feel like this is more the Church of Email; without regular sermons, the parish will wither. I see myself as no preacher, but perhaps a bit of a pastor, in that regard. I can comfort, console, and remind us all that we’re winning, but I also expect my “flock” to be strong and courageous, to fight the good fight, and to die willingly on the cross of modern software if we must, never bowing the knee even unto the last breath.

There are many such pastors out there. I barely qualify. Like most pastors, I’ve been thrust into the fracas, not entirely against my will, but also not entirely of my will either. I need encouragement, too. I need a community, too. (And lest someone suggest a Subreddit or the like, I think I’d find that too dispiriting, to see 5 members ranting, and 95 merely lurking).

But one thing I can do is post more often. Continue to build up visits here. Reach more people. And pave the way for a larger community of not just ad-hoc email supporters, but those who would resist the tyranny of Electron apps, siloed communication tools, 17 different user interfaces to master at one workplace alone, and bloated and nonperformant tools that not only disobey Unix’s “Do One Thing Well” mantra, but seem to be striving for the polar opposite: do many things as poorly as possible.

In posting more often, albeit likely shorter posts, my hope is to give other’s a “You too?” moment in their week so that they might brighten their outlook a smidge, curl their lips into a half-smile at least, flex their hand into a fist of rebellion, even if for a moment and under their desk, and cause them to remember that not all of modernity is a lost cause. That even this relatively new technology called blog publishing, can help us celebrate and promote a slightly older technology called email, and can remind us that, even outside of tech, that the old ways are not always the olden ways, but sometimes the better ways.

Until next time… keep @ing your friends and family and show them that you care more than a 👍.

  1. Apparently, it’s literally quite simple in recent versions of WordPress. Who knew? ↩︎

Email is the Ultimate Communication Boundary

Lauren Goode at Wired Magazine wrote a great piece that had my stomach in knots as I read it. She posits that, gasp, the boundaries between our instant messaging culture and what it used to be 25 years ago, when services like AOL Messenger existed, have degraded. She states those boundaries used to be clearer and, quite frankly, better for us.

In It’s Time to Bring Back the AIM Away Message, she almost hits the nail on the head. If you needed to step away from your AOL online account, you slapped up an Away message, or what we might call a “Status” these days. It allowed you to be online, but signal to everyone you weren’t totally available.

She makes the claim, on the one hand, that the Away message was a boundary, a healthy one, and I agree. But on the other hand, she makes a few remarks that, while relatively accurate about instant messaging, fail to make the case for the oldest and most popular protocol: email. She states that the AOL Away message was visible to potential senders before they messaged you (iOS Messages do tell other iOS Message senders if you have notifications turned off).

But here’s the thing: email is asynchronous by default. Everyone knows you might not answer, possibly for days, and they are – er, they have to be – okay with that, else why would they email you if they needed you to see it this minute? Email’s default is Away.

Lauren states that nothing like the AOL Away message exists in our modern messaging apps. Maybe she’s right. I try to avoid “modern messaging apps” like the plague, so I couldn’t rightly say if any have such a feature. But you’ll excuse me for thinking that email should be considered a “modern messaging app” in its own right and that email does indeed provide the boundaries that Lauren, like so many others, would like to reintroduce into their lives.

She does lightly touch on email twice in the article. I’m hesitant to criticize her on this, because she lovingly admits she is a communications curmudgeon.

She confesses late in the article that she has given up on her email inbox, only logging in to unsubscribe and mark others as spam. We’ve seen this before, especially with those who long ago sold their email soul to the e-commerce and marketing gods. What a shame. Guard your inbox like you guard your front door.

However, she also quotes a “tech CEO” who says he treats instant messaging like email. That’s a correct way to treat the cesspool that is modern-day instant messaging. I’ve already argued that instant messaging is no longer instant anyway, so why treat it as such?

But what’s the longer-term solution? We can’t actually go back to AOL Instant Messenger. It’s not a viable product.

But we can return to the beauty and power of email. It’s easy and it’s a better option than almost anything on the market. Here’s how:

Reply to your text messages (to all but your dearest loved ones) and write, “Slammed presently and want to get back with you. Will email you soon. I type faster on a big keyboard and can write more meaningfully when not distracted by the environment surrounding my mobile phone.” – Or words to that effect.

I can promise you that they will actually feel relieved in almost all cases. They will anticipate that email the way we used to anticipate snail mail letters from friends and family.

Sometimes I don’t even reply to the instant message. I just copy and paste it into an email draft, one of email’s superpowers, and later reply as if they had emailed it all along. If it’s the first time I’ve done it with a sender, I might preface the email with “Thought better to reply this way so I can give this its full consideration”. People appreciate it, and I suspect, appreciate it more than whatever half-witted reply I would have made via texting.

It’s to the point that a number of people in my circle (boy, I hate that expression: “people in my circle”) don’t even bother to text me. They just email – or send less messages altogether, something I rarely complain about.

If you think watching Netflix before bed is becoming an unhealthy habit (you’re right), instead write a short email to a friend who recently texted you, just as you might write a short personal letter back when you still knew how to handwrite. It’s fulfilling in a way that no text message can ever be.

Email is more powerful than any text messaging platform, and yet has built-in boundaries. And some of those boundaries are also the small amount of friction required to send email (which I called “fences” here).

I can’t quite make “boundaries” one of email’s superpowers, but the lack of boundaries is definitely a weakness on most all other modern-day messaging apps. I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but just use email.

How deliberate are your relationships?

As I increasingly ponder the beauty and wonder of email, such musings often transpose into thoughts on personal correspondence. Email is used for everything from transactional receipts for e-commerce purchases, newsletters, marketing salvos, password resets, and political donation solicitations. Certainly those amazing abilities pale in comparison to our collective use of email for personal and business correspondence.

If we’re being honest, we aren’t particularly excited to get emails from colleagues, but let’s also admit that email powers like that allow entire companies to power over one-third of the websites with a staff of 400+ scattered around the globe.

Still, it’s the personal correspondence by email that tickles our fancy and causes us to worry about losing our email archives. We won’t miss the password reset emails or even the e-commerce receipts, but emails from and to our friends and families – and even relative strangers on the internet – are what has the most value for us.

Email has largely replaced the written and mailed letter. We all love an actual letter from someone we care about. But it’s rare to get them, even at this time of year when families celebrate holidays and reach out to old friends.

For me, as like many of you, not only would it cost a small fortune to mail some of my friends (some are international), but some are difficult to mail, if at all. Some move with rapid frequency. Some don’t have access to reliable mail delivery. Some letters would take too long to arrive.

What’s additionally beautiful about email is how quickly a relationship can blossom by merely the written word, zipped across the internet. I’ve received nice emails at Just Use Email and have enjoyed some back and forth with people, all because of our shared interact and passion about email.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes the following:

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” … It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis

In our digital age, the emphasis is on that last sentence, “And instantly”, for while such in-person connection is amazing, the world of email opens doors to humanity’s vastness. An idiosyncratic belief, found perhaps nowhere in your community, can be the foundation of a lifelong friendship when it’s exposed to the world. Reddit and similar forums provide this, but the best of those commonalities find their way off those platforms and onto email, at least to start.

As I think about email as a tool for personal correspondence, I think of its inherit friction. The same friction others complain about is the force that elevates the worthiness of the written word when sent by email, similar to the higher value of a mailed letter.

When we write an email, we are deliberate. We choose words more carefully. We compose paragraphs. We collect our own thoughts, perhaps forming and editing them as we type, and we then entice our reader to share our elations, trials, challenges, and minor and major successes. We entice them with our own beliefs, we share our advice, we give the gift of us through the written word.

Because of the superpowers of email, we feel confident it will reach its recipient, unmarred, fully intact, and available to them at their leisure, yet delivered instantly. Even if they’re sick, on vacation, have moved counties or countries, or several years have elapsed since we last wrote to them, we have assurance that email will be up to the task with aplomb.

Like writing a paper, a blog post, or a book, we write with deliberation, energy, effort, and determination. Yet unlike other mediums, email usually is just to one or a few persons. It’s personal; it’s meant to touch one person. Such email correspondence is not usually meant for large audiences.

What do you do when you get such an email, rife with love, affection, friendship, or warmth? Do you more closely salivate over each sentence, far more than you would a text message or a social media post? Do you think upon it for several days before beginning a reply? How much time elapses before a reply takes too long, before the reply is apologetic and stale? Do you feel guilty if you don’t reply with equal gusto?

In other words, are you deliberate to those who are deliberate to you? Do you make space and time to write emails? Do you try to reply on your phone? Or do you have a proper workstation that allows fast composing of emails such that you send them off regularly?

In a sense, email is not only something used in a good relationship; it is a good relationship itself. It is deliberate, thoughtful, caring, requires effort, some may save it even requires love or a form of love, and email, rightly done, is almost always appreciated, like a hug.

Call me sentimental on this point. When I recently learned that President John Adams exchanged over 1,000 letters with his wife Abigail, only half of which have ever been published, I found that stunning. She also wrote back, not considering his letters to be spam or to be too voluminous.

Would we come even close to this today? Even over a 40-year relationship, that’s an average of two letters a month – to the same person. No, we are too busy consuming mass media, mass entertainment, publishing updates on social media for 300+ so-called friends. We’ve no time to dedicate 20 minutes twice a month to just one person, even a romantic interest, and maintain that year after year.

It’s worth considering, at this time of year, how we spend our time, not just our in-person visits, but how we will spend our digital and keyboard time this coming new year.

I’m no saint, but it strikes me that time spent deliberately writing email is, like friendship and deliberation in relationships, is time that has deep value for both sender and recipient.

How to Plan Anything by Email Alone — and why it’s Faster

Aside from professional project management, planning and collaborating on personal things – like trips and vacations, family reunions, summer camp options for the kids, or even advice – is best done by email, not specialized collaborative software tools online.

Thousands of SaaS businesses want to convince you to use their system to “share and create”, to “plan and strategize”, or to “post and update” others with whatever you’re working on. Many of them are merely misguided. Some are outright hostile to email.

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Email Love Links – March 2023

It’s been some time since I’ve posted links by others extolling email or its underlying virtues. Sometimes folks inadvertently promote concepts or ideals of email, even though they might not be discussing email directly.

I will be trying to do this more frequently. So stay tuned for more, or subscribe to the Just Use Email RSS feed.

Let’s start with one I disagree with, despite my great admiration and appreciation for its author, Cal Newport.

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Email Is a Good Fence

The proverb “good fences make good neighbors”, often attributed to poet Robert Frost, is the perfect metaphor for the beauty of email as the primary, if not sole, asynchronous communication method in the digital age.

The origin of the phrase is not entirely clear. Interesting Literature states an earlier reference in 1640 from E. Rogers, who wrote “A good fence helpeth to keepe peace between neighbours; but let vs take heed that we make not a high stone wall, to keepe vs from meeting.”

That high stone wall might today by postal mail. For some, it might be a little too much friction, although I would argue that postal mail is the most classic and perfect of all written communication among friends (and neighbors). But for many, if we waited for that inevitable letter in the mail, we might never get one.

This, however, is the pedantic excuse of all text messengers. Those wired to their phone each day, pinging and tapping, sending and receiving, draining their dopamine to the point of fatigue, would argue that should they try instead to live by email alone, they would never hear back from their friends, families, and neighbors.

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Why Virtual Meetings may be the Death of Email

Some have been hoping, perhaps praying, for the death of email. Every “solution” has been tried, but none have prevailed.

Some claim email has even “brought them to tears” and that receiving email “is like getting stabbed”.

But despite the many doomed “save the world from email” companies that keep cropping up, there may be a more insidious threat to the 50-year legacy of email: virtual meetings.

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Slack is Disliked

Just when you thought it was safe to go into group messaging again, just when remote work seemingly guaranteed Slack a permanent fixture on the internet, just when Salesforce threw their weight and $27.7 billion dollars at Slack, now seems like the perfect time to reflect upon Slack and if it really is the savior of digital workplace communication.

Email is the all-time champion, and even today, would beat up Slack in the ring. After all, email has superpowers that Slack can only dream about.

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Gen Z will not ‘free’ us from email: A response to the NY Times article

Sigh. Here we go again. The New York Times used a slow news day to vent about email and hint that Generation Z will one day free us from email.

A fan of ‘Just Use Email’ told me about this article knowing it would ‘trigger’ me (to use a Gen Z word). It worked (ha). Thusly triggered, I’m now firing back. Pew-pew.

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One Sentence Email Tips

Writer Josh Spector published yesterday a collection of 40 one-sentence email tips. It’s worth your time to peruse if you’re a fan of just using email.

Normally, when I see articles giving ‘tips’ on how to use email better, I roll my eyes and start reading only to discover the same ol’ trite. The problem with most of those articles is that they subscribe to the notion that email is the bomb or that email is a time bomb.

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Email Newsletters are not the Savior of Email

In the past few years, there has been a resurgence of interest in email newsletters. Some are touting email newsletters as the great savior of email.

One theory is that it was related to the pandemic lockdowns and people simply wanting more information to absorb. With standard newsstands shutdown in big cities, email newsletters seemed to fill a void.

Another theory is that with Big Tech ‘cancelling’ certain types of information found on their websites, email newsletters were the way to get information that might be otherwise removed from social media sites. Email newsletters could be the counter-revolution.

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Basecamp’s Hey Email Service with Apple Mail (for free?)

Can’t Apple’s email do almost all of Basecamp’s new Hey email’s top 20 features?

The reason Hey’s email service caught my attention is that Basecamp specifically calls out Apple (among the other big email providers). I was a bit surprised when I read Hey’s Top 20 features.

The Hey Email service was started by long-time internet developers Jason Fried, a co-founder of project planning software Basecamp. He and his business partner, David Heinemeier Hansson (frequently referred to as DHH) have been in the news lately for some rather loud missteps about how they handled some workplace controversies. That’s not the point of this article; running a business is hard. The reason they get noticed is because they’ve written loudly themselves for many years on the “proper” way to do business, remote work, and other initiatives. They have contributed some good things to the conversation and, for such a small company, have a rather broad reach.

However, when I saw that they started a new company called “Hey” and that their main premise, much like Slack’s, is that “Email is broken” and that, of course, they were the latest ones to claim they had a fix for it (for your hard-earned dollars, of course), I started following their new service closely.

To be fair, a few features are unique to Hey. But are they worth $100/year?

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Instant Messaging is no longer ‘instant’

The concept of instant messaging, in its various forms, has been around since dialup days. Recall the scene in the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail when the two characters, Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly, respectively played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, suddenly realize they are both “online” at the same time and begin to use instant messaging.

In the early scenes, the two characters are pen pals, using America Online’s email to communicate under pseudonyms. Their emails are filled with thoughtful prose, captivating observations on their daily lives, and underneath the plain text, a hint of flirtation, despite them both being in committed relationships at the time.

However, a moment comes when Joe decides to breach protocol and, noticing Kathleen is also online at the same time, sends her an instant message. The look on Meg Ryan’s character says it all. She’s initially taken aback.

Suddenly, she can no longer write contemplatively and asyncronously, but is required to muster the courage to reply “in the moment”. He can see she is online! To ignore him, after all the emails have gone back and forth, would be rude.

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Dislikes about email are Questionable

Blogger Lars Wirzenius asked followers last year what they liked and disliked about email. He then summarized those email likes and dislikes here.

The dislikes about email were typical and, in my opinion, represent several myths about email that disgorge into modern discussions about productivity and communication.

These knee-jerk prima facie reactions to using email are not invalid entirely, but misunderstandings must be clarified. I’m not covering all of the dislikes people mentioned in his post as some were extreme edge cases or didn’t apply to the average Joe.

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Welcome to Just Use Email

If you haven’t already, read the About page to get a sense of what this website is about and what my purpose is in sharing it with you.

We have much to look forward to, but first let me say a hearty welcome for just stopping by.

I don’t have all the answers. But I hope to be able to inspire and motivate many to more purpose-filled and focused work (and leisure) by just using email for an increasing amount of communication and tasks related to our digital lives and businesses.

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