Entry #7: Socialism & E-Mail

Yesterday's NY Times printed an article in the Tech section on managing one's email that I must riff on this morning. I'm old enough to remember the advent of personal computers, fax machines and e-mail in the workplace. (Remember the debate about legally / contractually binding signatures on facsimiles? Ah, the olden days, 1987). I'm also old enough to remember mimeographs, punch-card computers in massive, air-conditioned computer rooms and actual inboxes on desks into which the daily mail arrived, sorted, stamped and anticipated twice daily - once in the morning, once in the afternoon - by professional administrative staff that know what to do with most of the incoming mail and how to direct their bosses to get their work done. This would be the same century as secretaries, filing systems and no concept of business casual.

Aside, this was also the time when the employee-employer contract was a straightforward deal, at least in the white collar space and union shops. Worker gives employer soul for 40 hours a week, leaving life, family and opinions at the door, in exchange for salary, healthcare and pension benefits. We call this the paternalistic model. The company (sociopath that it is - oh, wait, that's the corporation and a different topic, nevermind). Anyway, the company took care of you - HR, formerly known as Personnel, made sure you got paid, could pay for the odd hospital visit, and could afford to retire when it was time for you to go.

Fastforward to today and the contract has changed. We've been through HMOs and cost-shifting (also downsizing, the end of loyalty and the broken contract), and now we are facing a choice: fully free market individualism (give me the cash, my preference, to spend on health and retirement or Las Vegas as I see fit) or Nationalized Healthcare - Socialized Medicine.

As I said in my post yesterday, I would love to believe health care is a human right - and basic health care is - like access to clean water, safe food, medicines like antibiotics that save children and adults from the most common, pervasive illnesses like the flu, preventative care and vaccines, all (not so basic in most the world) human rights. But the way healthcare happens in the US of A? Not a right - not even a privilege - insurance bar association money fueled spending on ridiculous health services that most Americans are a) appalled at and b) not interested in has so warped what constitutes good healthcare that we can't distinguish among good and bad choices nor can we improve outcomes because we've created such disparates in health that you either have more than you need or none at all.

Wow. Didn't see that rant coming. Anyway, you know what I mean. System broke. How to fix? Free market individualism or socialism?

But wait - back to e-mail. So the essential premise of this article yesterday is that one should maintain a pristine (read: empty) inbox. That one must not let e-mail rule one's life. That e-mail is not work, work is work and e-mail must be managed appropriately.

God save me from preachy reporters who've obviously never held a professional full-time job. Or is it my perspective that is warped? Entirely possible. Many people in many jobs don't face an avalanche of daily e-mail. Doctors, teachers, store clerks, call-center employees, construction workers, farmers, artists and other entire employment categories don't rely on e-mail to get the job done. But for business people of all stripes - from finance to advertising, bureaucrats and certain other "white collar" fields, e-mail is the life blood of work. Me and my peeps - you know who you are - receive easily 100-150 email a day at work (and most of us maintain separate personal e-mail addresses for the social, family, friends, political, civil, spiritual stuff that makes life worthwhile). I'm not sure where journalists fall on the spectrum but I'd always assumed they like me are inundated. I mean since media & PR are part of my scope, I know we send press releases and other really important, meaningful, newsworthy tidbits to the journalists and editors in our world as part of our strategy to raise visibility and get the word out. Multiply that by everyone else who does and those journalists have to be in the same boat as those of us who have routinely out of control email inboxes.

Now, I checked in with some of my team members and colleagues, and also of course my husband who is the benchmark by which I measure most of my perspectives. There are one or two among them that do maintain a pristine inbox. But when I delved deeper I began to discern two very important factors: no one reported to them and they weren't married with children. (my biased presumption being they had fewer responsibilities and therefore more time to devote to managing their inboxes.) (note to self - step into the working mother vs stay-at-home mother vs the career woman, no children debate in a future blog.)

Everyone else faced out of control e-mail and didn't particularly think the empty e-mail was a reality. There is one other exception I know of - a really smart IT guy who is aggressive about his inbox and has a fairly complex system of reading, responding, filing and creating tasks. But he's a workaholic and I'm pretty sure he doesn't have any kids either.

The rest of us, we know what we're supposed to do and sometimes we do it. We tend to delete the emails we don't need, respond quickly to the ones that are easy to respond quickly and even file the ones we can file easily. But there are two other categories of e-mail that require more attention, consume more time, and pretty much blow us out of the water. One type of these e-mails are the work related ones - those that require more than two minutes of action, contain documents to review, project plans to approve, budgets to cut, guidance for performance management, links to other systems or resources for research, management and basic daily work activities like contracting, paying bills and managing people. You know, work? I haven't done a scientific study of this category but probably a good 40 - 50% of my inbox is this type of email.

Then there's the other type. This is the water cooler type. Not gossip per se but you know you're connected when you are on the right email chains. Ya'll know what I mean. A certain group of emails are a measure of how well connected you are to the political structure of the firm - that informal but all powerful network of minds and groups that truly influences the direction and focus of the firm. Not the outward, on paper structure but the linkages among groups that are the engine of every organization. I'm guessing I could eliminate at least 20% of my email if I got off some the email chains that weren't directly related to my work except that these are indirectly relevant and have a far greater impact on my work like and success than the actual work emails. So, I'm thinking getting out of the political net would be akin to professional suicide. And I'm not saying I'm that connected - just enough to know some of what's going on.

So in the good old days when the inbox was actually a box on your desktop -two boxes actually, one for incoming, one for outgoing mail, and what a sense of accomplishment one achieved by getting through one's inbox - in those days you both measured your worth by the volume of inbox items and measured the length of your day by the volume of incoming mail since the amount of mail directly tied to how long you'd be working or how much disruption from your real work you'd have to deal with. I may be rewriting and romanticizing the past and it's hard for me to judge the difference between early, entry-level, junior jobs and my current status, but I think there is an order of magnitude difference in difficulty keeping on top of the inbox that has more to do with technology and less to do with accumulating responsibility as I progress in my career.

Let me clarify what I mean. In the good old days, technology (and protocol) limited the number of items that could arrive in the inbox, be processed for the outbox and generally kept down the amount of (printed) communications. Remember writing a memo? Typing a letter? Strategically planning the cc list? Old fashioned office technology kept the inbox in check.

Fast forward to today. We know that technology, rather than ending the paper chase, exploded paper. It has also undermined the protocols and actual costs that served to limit communications. In isolating us from our teams - and enabling global workforces - technology has also exploded the water cooler (and annual meeting) networks that kept people "in the know". More than anything though, e-mail has dramatically increased the volume and type of communications. Many of them may be unnecessary but most of them are legitimate work-related communications. The problem is the boundaries of technology, the elimination of protocols and the associated "controls" that were erased in the "downsizing, rightsizing, flattening" of organizations in the 80s and 90s, and the explosion of not just a globalized but also the freed untethered from the office workforce have made it all but impossible to achieve the pristine inbox. When we finally learn new ways to work - and finally take back our lives from the choking, smothering, ever increasing inbox - when we finally shout from the roof tops - enough already, I'm not going to take it anymore - then maybe we'll gain control of the inbox. But until then, I say to the journalist who wrote the article that set me off on this riff, get real, get a real job and stop making those of us with less than pristine inboxes (right now mine has 1946 items and that's just Feb/Mar) out to be the disorganized, out of control bad guys. (Basics: An Empty In-Box, or With Just a Few E-Mail Messages? Read On By FARHAD MANJOO Suggestions for maintaining an empty in-box).

Concluding note: I was also going to write about socialism today and the trade off among security and creativity and freedom. The idea is with socialized medicine and pensions, will we also be required to continue to allow the erosion of our civil liberties or will we get the best of all worlds - nationalized health and freedom of speech? Think France. Similarly, does socialism actually stymie creativity? Again, think France. I touched on the topic yesterday and have some more thoughts but you've had enough, dear reader, haven't you? ttyl