Yesterday I lamented that I wasn’t seeing any discussion about how email overload is fundamentally a collaboration problem (as opposed to a personal information management issue).

Then of course, I immediately ran into this one.

So, is it true? Will a new generation of collaboration tools help us wean ourselves off email? (The same way IM and social networking have already weaned us off email for social interactions.)

We hope so.

Chandler is most useful when used as an alternative for all the important stuff you used to do with email.

This should be true if you’re just using Chandler for yourself. This is doubly true if you’re sharing with others because at its best, Chandler opens up an alternative, more ergonomic channel for collaboration that results in fewer bits of information to keep track of and allows the group to leverage individual efforts to manage and organize information.

However, any collaboration medium that attempts to supplant email needs to retain what’s great about email while avoiding the pitfalls that have us all reeling from overflowing inboxes.

Here are some lists of email characteristics we want to emulate and avoid in Chandler.

What we want to keep: Email doesn’t get in the way of your ideas!

1. Every new message is a blank slate. Unlike other collaboration mediums (CMSes, Wikis, Project Managers, Shared Documents) composing new email doesn’t require you to first figure out how this “new thing” fits in with everything that’s come before.
2. Email lets you tackle issues in bite-sized pieces.
   

   Bite-sized means it’s easier to get started on tackling hard problems.

   Bite-sized also means you can manage email like a task list (as many people do). This in turn helps you multi-task. You can start, develop, fork and resolve dozens of threads at the same time. You keep track of it all by flagging/filing individual messages. With email, big, intractable problems are conveniently broken down into bite-sized next actions.

3. Email lets you tackle issues from multiple angles. You can formulate and reformulate what you’re thinking in a dozen different ways, addressed to a dozen different groups of people. Again, unlike other collaboration mediums, there’s no pre-existing structure to get in the way of what you need to do. Each new message/thread exists as it’s own, independent topic of discussion.
4. Email is free-form. Email messages are all about the wide-open field of unstructured data we call the message body. It allows you to focus on what you need to communicate! Whom you need to communicate with, is the only unavoidable decision you need to make. However, with the advent of aliases (everyone@wholeoffice), even that decision is avoidable.

What we want to keep: Email is still our best collaboration tool.

1. Email is universal. Not everyone is on your Exchange server. Not everyone has access to your company’s intranet. But everyone (for all intensive purposes) is on email these days. Email is the one communication medium where you’re guaranteed to get through (except when overzealous SPAM filters get in the way). Whether someone will actually absorb your communication is a separate issue.
2. Email is asynchronous. You can continue to make progress on other work as you wait for responses. This means you can work independently of your colleagues without losing touch.
3. Email keeps you up-to-date on what’s new. Every “new” piece of information is pushed to you as a new message. You never have to remember to “check-in” to find out what’s going on. You also never have to go hunting through an edited document wondering, What’s changed? Did something change?
4. Email encourages discussion. Email is linear. Each person gets their say. (However, while talking on top of one another is no longer a problem, no tool can prevent people from talking past each other.)

What we want to avoid and improve on: Email begets more email!
The very qualities that make email the defining tool of the information workplace are also its Achilles heel. Email is too easy to send. Each email in turn spawns more email to the point where you can no longer see the forest for the trees and you need to create more bits of information to keep track of the bits you’re losing in email.

1. There’s no way to “silently” make information available on an “as-needed” basis. To get information out, you have to send the email, thereby actively pinging every recipient with a message, regardless of whether you need their active attention. Ergo, we all get a lot of FYI mail, which in turn, dilutes the pool of mail that actually requires a response.
2. You can’t edit email. Once you’ve sent it, it’s done. If you forgot something, if someone else wants to add something to your list, if there’s been a change in plans, you’ll have to send a separate email. Ergo, we all get a lot of “update” emails.
3. When a mail goes out to 1 or 200 people, every recipient has to do the work of processing that email. Oftentimes, we process it in exactly the same way: Received a notice to hand in your benefit forms? Add it to the calendar. Put it in your “HR” folder. Yet, there’s no good way to distribute that work across the group. Ergo, we all spend a lot of time managing email.
4. There’s no way to add structure to email. The unstructured, blank slate that email offers when you’re initially composing the message is great for unblocking the free-flow of information. However, once you do have enough of a clue to add a bit more structure, you can’t. Ergo, email results in the creation of even more bits of information to manage as each email creates new calendar events and task items.
5. There’s no source of truth. Decisions are amended and reversed over multiple, forking threads. People are added and removed from conversations. Uncovering “the truth” in email turns out to be subjective and hard-won.

There are a dozen different ways in which Chandler strives to meet the ideal described above. We’ve already begun to see success stories of users moving their work from email into Chandler and we’re using them to help us become a better alternative to email!