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Vox Pop: Managing actions from list emails?
Merlin Mann | Jul 30 2007
During the Q&A portion of my Inbox Zero presentation at Google the other day, an audience member stumped me with a question about how to manage action around mailing list distributions (the question starts at about 48:22). He said he frequently receives email requests and questions that are also distributed to the other 20 people on his team. He describes a "waiting game" in which team members hang back to see if other people will respond first -- at least partly out of not wanting to duplicate effort or flood the sender. I thought it was a really intriguing question, although I said (and still believe) that distributed email would not personally be my first choice to handle this kind of communication. Well, based on the reaction in the room that day, I gathered that this is a common dilemma for Googlers. Funny thing is that, since the video went up, I've received a lot of email from people outside the Googleplex who share the same problem -- a few of whom were aghast that I wasn't aware what a huge pain this is for knowledge workers. And to an extent, I'll admit those folks were mostly right. I do know about the pain of being on multiple email lists, and it's why I've spent the last ten years trying desperately to stay off of them. I also know and dread the poorly-worded action request that requires vivisection with a magnifying glass and tweezers. But I suppose I never really thought about the cumulative effects that distribution lists can have across a company -- especially given the geometric nature of their influence, and especially if some 500 emails a day must be monitored and processed for potential action items. That's just stunning to me. So: open thread for you email veterans to chime in... How does your team handle these sorts of distributed requests? How are you personally managing possible actions that stem from email distributions? Are there success stories for the distributed email approach? Anyone found better media than email for managing this stuff? Do we all just need to make our peace with getting 2,000 interoffice emails a week, and move on? What's the solution? 39 Comments
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 I used to work on...Submitted by Erik Ackerman (not verified) on July 30, 2007 - 11:32am.
I used to work on a team that handled this issue by taking it out of e-mail. Any such e-mail would be responded to with a template by anyone in the TO: field (CCs ignored it). If you had 20 people in the TO: field, you got flooded by template responses, which usually broke people of that habit. The template would redirect them to a ticketing system. We've used Trac and TasksPro, but any ticketing system will work. In the ticketing system, the submitter is forced to select a single owner (often by default, as the owner of the component they're ticketing). The other aspect that made this work for us, so that people did not have to constantly check the ticketing system was RSS feeds. By adding the feeds for your projects to your news reader, which you probably have open anyway, you get updates on your tasks regularly. We also provided RSS feeds for lots of other stuff, like spec changes. Worked really well right up until that team was disbanded. The other teams still haven't caught up. ;) » POSTED IN:
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