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.
