Is Email Making Professors Stupid? | Hacker News Reader

Is Email Making Professors Stupid?

chronicle.com

33 pointsMistletoe28 comments

I'm intrigued by the story of Donald Knuth, which I've seen bandied about lately. One critical fact that is always missing: while he may have given up email in 1990, he retired to emeritus status in 1993.

> In 1968 Knuth joined the faculty at Stanford University, and served until his retirement in 1993, after which he was designated Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming. [1]

What's the difference between being an active-duty professor and an emeritus professor? It means he didn't have to teach classes, do much (any?) departmental service, or be in active communication with administrators. All of these things require email these days, which is why other professors can't "pull a Knuth".

So while folks like to trot out the story of Donald Knuth, we should keep in mind the context. He's not a regular professor, or even a regular senior professor. He is — and has been since 1993 — an emeritus professor who has practically no day-to-day responsibilities at the University.

1: https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/c...

His website [1] claims he is retired. He goes on to saying how he is like a hermit and needs long batches on un-interrupted time. Worth a look, he's an interesting fellow.

1: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html

Emeritus is basically retired. You have continued access to university resources, but little/nothing is required of you. Source: my wife happens to be a professor at the same university.

The author should have written to Donald Knuth with an interview request for this piece. It would have added something special beyond just repeating what's already visible on his website.

I wrote to Professor Knuth about a project I did a year or two ago and was pleasantly surprised to receive a two page handwritten note in response. So it seems like the no-email filter is probably still working well for him.

Huge amounts of uninterrupted time of course gives us the ability to deep-dive into certain subjects, but there's obviously the necessity of asynchronous communication that doesn't move at postal speeds. Having said that though, frequent context switches really make a huge difference on how productive I am in a day. I remember reading somewhere that checking your email at a rate of even once or twice an hour is enough to effectively kill your productivity for cognitively heavy tasks.

The fact that he has his secretary print out emails for him to write responses onto is a little hardcore, but I imagine that it tremendously helps with keeping his life distraction-free.

Startup Idea:

An email service that only delivers messages once or twice a day.

Anything that aligns incentives between the startup's business and user communication effectiveness would be welcome, honestly. So many services are just designed for "engagement," which often leads to synchronous alerts and chat-like communication.

Google Inbox had this feature. RIP

While it seems interesting at first glance, it would be weird to be paying for a product that does "less" than alternatives. The added value of strictly enforcing this policy is also something that people can learn to do innately. Also, distraction-prevention startups never seem to work well ultimately, since people want to distract themselves.

Startup idea: a mail service that only delivers once a day, has a nominal cost to senders, and has a secretary service to throw out the advertisements and other junk.

Note: a spam filter does not fulfill the secretarial service requirement.

Just use any email application and don't have it online all day, except when you manually sync.

I bet you could use Mail.app and create an automator task to run on a schedule. Or just use a cron job.

The idea is more about instilling a culture of treating email or something like it in a specific way by introducing restrictions which are unavoidable and not about changing how one person reads email.

That's why I included the second part of my comment. It automates it so you don't have to think about it.

In Thunderbird, go to 'Options > Account Settings', select 'Server Settings' for the server you want to limit from the list on the left, and change the 'Check for new messages every' field to 720 (or however many minutes you want between emails).

I'm certain there are equivalent settings in most email clients.

Edit: Updated seconds to minutes, I misread the form. Although I'm happy to report that you can set it to check every 43200 minutes if you so desire. :)

It is also possible to just not check your email more than once a day, but that's not really the point (which was mostly a joke)

Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them and are overwhelmed by messages nobody needs to read. Slack and the like capitalize on being different from email by being instant and easy, what if someone else could capitalize on being slow and encouraging not-interrupting-people and putting thought into long form communication. (how many meetings have we all been to that should have been three sentences in an email?)

> Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read them

What organization do you work in? Everywhere I've worked, I've been responsible for every piece of information sent to me. Slack doesn't help at all. Conversations are based on person-to-person communications rather than ideas like an email thread with a subject line.

I have been in many different environments almost exclusively technical organizations selling tech in some form or another from tiny startups to enormous organizations, and the only time I remember anybody really caring about email was my first job at a university. I think that was mostly because IM barely existed (literally my first task was setting up an XMPP server).

> I have been in many different environments almost exclusively technical organizations selling tech in some form or another ... he only time I remember anybody really caring about email was my first job at a university

So when a sales person recieved an email from a prospect they would ignore it? When a developer recieved an email about a bug in production they would ignore it? All communication was done over chat? It's not impossible, but pretty implausible.

Email is indispensable in organisations because it automatically creates a comprehensive permanent record of all communications (and optimally, one which is searchable after the employee in question has left - keep your work and personal emails separate, people!) Searching old emails for information is a core part of my workflow and has saved my bacon more times than I can count.

(Further to this - I've made it standard practice to send an email after any important phone call, summarizing the conclusions of the phone call. That way both parties have a record of what I thought we decided, and if the other party doesn't disagree then their tacit acceptance is also recorded.)

In regards to the question of whether professors should be managers or monastics: professors are essentially managers.

Supervising a research group is engineering manager, product manager, project manager, marketing manager, career coach, and fundraiser all in one. Most professors aren't trained in management unfortunately, because one doesn't (usually) learn those skills during a PhD.

Most generally accepted management techniques would make any professor more effective.

(source: I have a PhD, worked in research including briefly as a professor, and am now in a startup)

You're describing STEM professors. Humanities professors don't manage research teams or fundraise much. Ditto social science, for the most part.

Are wet streets making it rain?

/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid

Interactive?

All it was was a GIF in the header yeah?

I'm very comfortable with this specific level of interactivity. :)

tl;dr seems to be "get an assistant so you can focus".

yea, I imagine that helps quite a bit. but it doesn't really address the problem, nor is it accessible to the vast majority of people.

Honestly, it should be.

Take the amount of productivity amplification you can get with assistants and pay the assistant 80% of that. It doesn't have to be 'everybody gets a personal assistant'.

Managers and PMs and the like should be taking on these kinds of roles, but in my experience they either don't do it or they turn it into micromanaging which makes things more, not less difficult.

It's more a matter of "hire (or budget for) assistants so your prize people can focus".

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