The Interrupt-Driven Professional
Suppose an organization set up its meetings and other conversations like this:
Remarkably, this is exactly the way e-mail conversations work, and we accept e-mail and use it a lot. Probably this is because:
Observing diverse professionals, it is obvious that they spend much of each day being interrupted by incoming messages, and by reading, writing, searching, organizing and deleting e-mail, in ways that cause almost constant contextual switching. Their inboxes are heaps of hundreds of partially completed or untouched requests. The most productive professionals spend long hours after the main part of the business day getting their "real" work done, in part because there is much less e-mail to respond to during these hours.
To fix e-mail, we need to introduce some of the basic concepts of a well-run meeting to e-mail. E-mail needs an explicit, rather than implicit, implementation of the concept of a conversation, including an agenda and a participant list. The participants should be able to accept or decline participation in the conversation, it should be clear which participants have accepted, whether they are actually participating, and how and when the meeting has ended.
Until e-mail is fixed through some kind of generally available and accepted protocol enhancements like those described above, the price of conducting so many conversations, concurrently, asynchronously, without agenda, and without any opportunity to decline has made it nearly unworkable.
- anyone can start a conversation consisting of any group of people at any time
- there isn't any opportunity to accept or decline participation
- there is no agreed-upon agenda set prior to the conversation starting
- once started, there is no requirement that the participants form an agenda
- once started, anyone can drop out at any time, although they keep getting prodded to re-enter
- anyone in the conversation can include or exclude anyone else at any time
- when a person is part of a conversation, it isn't clear whether they are actually listening or present
- the conversation ends without a clear demarcation that it is about to end or has ended
Remarkably, this is exactly the way e-mail conversations work, and we accept e-mail and use it a lot. Probably this is because:
- we think there is little cost in participating in a conversation via e-mail
- e-mail makes us very accessible to one another
- the conversation can occur asynchronously
- we get a record of any conversation conducted via e-mail
- we can formulate our thoughts more carefully if we don't have to respond in real-time as we are expected to do in a face-to-face conversation
- we can drop out at any time, although we get prodded to re-enter each time a new message comes in
Observing diverse professionals, it is obvious that they spend much of each day being interrupted by incoming messages, and by reading, writing, searching, organizing and deleting e-mail, in ways that cause almost constant contextual switching. Their inboxes are heaps of hundreds of partially completed or untouched requests. The most productive professionals spend long hours after the main part of the business day getting their "real" work done, in part because there is much less e-mail to respond to during these hours.
To fix e-mail, we need to introduce some of the basic concepts of a well-run meeting to e-mail. E-mail needs an explicit, rather than implicit, implementation of the concept of a conversation, including an agenda and a participant list. The participants should be able to accept or decline participation in the conversation, it should be clear which participants have accepted, whether they are actually participating, and how and when the meeting has ended.
Until e-mail is fixed through some kind of generally available and accepted protocol enhancements like those described above, the price of conducting so many conversations, concurrently, asynchronously, without agenda, and without any opportunity to decline has made it nearly unworkable.
posted by Brian Hill at 7:01 PM
