UK company is shutting down email for a week as an experiment | Hacker News Reader

UK company is shutting down email for a week as an experiment

emailepidemic.yolkrecruitment.com

34 pointsdoh36 comments

Speaking as somewhat of an introvert I find having to conduct a real-time telephone conversation hugely more disrupting to my "coding flow" than reading or responding to email/IM/IRC. Perhaps this no-email idea works in an office where part of people's job is to be sort of extrovert (i.e. recruitment agents), but in an office with (dare I say it) a more cerebral atmosphere I can't see it going down well. It sounds like the pet project of some extrovert management person, and because they instinctively place huge value on real-time communication with fleshy mouth parts, and their inbox is overflowing, they think everyone else is in the same boat. Not convinced.

Besides, perhaps the most annoying thing a recruitment agency can ever do is leave you a long rambling answer phone message with their phone number at the end. You end up having to listen to the damn thing multiple times to copy down the number and phone them back at your expense. Just email me, I'll get right back to you if I'm interested.

Speaking as somewhat of an introvert I find having to conduct a real-time telephone conversation hugely more disrupting to my "coding flow" than reading or responding to email/IM/IRC.

Sure. But this is an opportunity to further optimise office workflow. Given how disruptive face to face meetings and telephone calls are, why not get them all done in the first two hours of the workday? Then you can head to your desk and work totally uninterrupted. With e-mail interruption I'm constantly in and out of the zone.

It sounds like the pet project of some extrovert management person [...] Not convinced.

I'm not convinced either, but that passage just makes you sound like "some introvert coder person". There isn't a "right" answer to this- you and the imagined extrovert have a difference of opinion, but labeling yourself as more "cerebral" doesn't mean you are right. Loud, extroverted co-workers who get in your space are annoying. So are introverted programmers that spend all day with earphones in refusing to engage with the team around them.

If I'm sounding like I'm some introvert coder person it's because I am. Introversion doesn't have to mean that you wear headphones and refuse to engage with anybody, it can just mean that direct human interaction takes up more of your concentration. I'm not sure what I wrote that made you think I thought there was a "right" answer? It seems obvious from both our comments that neither of us think this so I guess something in my tone/wording rubbed you up the wrong way, so for that I apologise. I was attempting to communicate that any high-handed company wide commands are unlikely to fit with everyone's personal foibles. At the end of the day I think a relaxed culture of mutual consideration of our colleagues working practices is the way to go.

Brilliant if you can do this, our company could never enforce this. Email is the last line in defence in a "he said, she said" situation where we need proof of changes in a project.

Picking up the phone is great and making notes but notes are not proof that something has changed. I ask all clients to confirm a phone conversation in email

This is dead on. It's not just a defense when someone changes their mind later on, it's an action item summary that clarifies what was actually agreed upon vs. what you were just thinking out loud about.

Every conversation is a mix of 'what if we did this...' and 'right, let's do this first then...'. An email makes it crystal clear for people after a call.

I'm not crazy about a campaign against one of the remaining bulwarks against an increasingly oligopolistic internet.

You mean one of the least confrontational bulwarks.

They do have a point that email does afford a bit of anonymity (I think the operative word should be "buffer" though), but in terms of spam, the walled gardens are still a little behind in that aspect.

I'm not sure their approach is really any better. If anything Skype may be a more appropriate substitute. During my time as a CS agent, I found that people are less likely to be an ass when they're faced with a human being than a script-reading voice.

I like email. But then again I've had email in some sort since the mid '80s and know how to use it as a tool. I don't do any instant messaging nor normally answer the office phone during work hours, it's too distracting. Very few things need immediate attention, filters and other means allow me to choose those.

That's 20 useful emails a week their employees won't be receiving. I look forward to a world where I'm competing with companies that don't allow their employees to use email :-)

The article mentions Yammer: we’ve had good success with both that and Campfire as a way for increasing internal communication but keeping it ambient rather than directed.

Good marketing for them.

I get about 100 emails a week at my work address. 80 of those are internal, and about 30 of those internal messages are 'all staff'. I just set a filter to dump those into a folder and empty it now and again.

The external emails are usually from students asking questions or warning of absence &c. I keep those long enough to log the reason and to reply.

The 50 or so 'real' internal messages seldom go to three messages. If I did not reply to those by email, I'd have to reply on paper memo forms.

Teaching is basically face2face. The admin goes on email.

I wish I just got about 100 emails a week; I'm about twice that on average. Some of that is unavoidable -- I deal with our US office a lot, so email is often easier because it's asynchronous.

What really upsets me is when people sitting in the same open-plan as me will email things to me rather than handing them to me, or turning and saying, ``Could you please take a look at this?''

Where I work now, and a couple places I've worked in the past, email have become the go-to `solution' to the `problem' of covering your arse. Almost nobody will do anything now without first getting an email instructing them to do so -- even if it's already been discussed at length. They `need' it so they have a paper-trail in case something goes belly-up.

These problems are more cultural than technological, but email has really enabled them to flourish in a way that paper memos didn't.

"They `need' it so they have a paper-trail in case something goes belly-up."

We had that before email. It used to be handwritten memos on three part carbonised sets, original and yellow copy were sent and the blue one kept, the other person wrote their reply underneath and then kept the yellow one. I wish I had kept a few of those forms - the Internet seems not to know them...

What I'm saying is that it is all down to the organisational culture. Any technology will be used in a way that conforms to the culture!

Atos Origin announced abandoning internal emails a couple of years ago: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/atos-orgin-to-abandon-i...

At a quick glance, couldn't find anything more up to date about their progress.

Interesting proposition, but too blanket of a policy to be a long-term solution.

Email is the biggest problem to those who not only receive large amounts (100+) but also have to spend large amounts of time coordinating responses to those emails (it is not quantity of email received, but complexity of replies that drives email overload). Shutting it off to everyone removes a valuable communication channel that, while often abused, is important in the workplace.

One of the best things a company could actually do IMO if they wanted to mandate an experiment, is to have everyone chunk their email checking and responding times. Studies have shown doing so, checking for example 6 times a day, greatly reduces context-switching losses and reduces time taken to complete primary tasks.

A related area is focusing on key objectives and tasks each day. Some of our https://weekdone.com/ weekly planning & status reporting service users have allow people to list 3-5 key goals per week and do things only if they match those 3-5 goals. Having tried that myself with our team as well, it's hard as hell. You always end up doing something from your 20-50 small todo list items, not the 5 big things.

Email is just a stream of information. It can be badly managed and annoying or well managed and useful. The one massive advantage over a random social network is that absolutely everyone has it and can use it. It neatly sidesteps all the authentication/sign up/access problems which make other services difficult to use between large organisations. It may sometimes fail as an app, but it is hugely successful and useful as a protocol.

it is hard to believe a recruitment agency can stop emails.

I think they did not mean to stop using emails in the sense of not using it at all. It is more about making it efficient. Check out the part where they suggest '3 and no more'. Imagine going in endless email loops like Inception :)

That's our intention exactly. No-one receives training on how to use correctly use emails which is why we're doing this to encourage our staff to be a lot more aware of what they are doing.

I love the way that it has 0 training in-built. There's no need to get training for not doing something; only know that you don't need to do it :)

Yes they are notorious spammers.

I think what they're suggesting is that their internal strategizing on how to spam people with as many poor resumes as possible should be restricted, while they're quite happy to keep sending them to their entire mailing list at any time.

They just don't want their mobiles constantly going off, when people reply to their spam complaining.

I don't get why people suggest the use of EOM and NTTR (btw, why is it not spelled NNTR? That would be far more logical to me. anyways..). If there is a clear sign that the sender wants me to reply (such as a question, or a request for feedback etc) then I reply. Otherwise I read the email and archive it. I guess what I mean is, EOM/NTTR should be obvious from the content.

NNTR (or something similar) can be pretty useful: a lot of people send long, rambling emails that don't clearly state what they want. In cases like that, `NNTR' or `Just FYI' can be a God-send.

I also like the idea of a checklist at the top of emails, as suggested in Inbox Zero[1]:

  This email is:    [ ] actionable   [x] fyi        [ ] social
  Response needed:  [ ] yes          [x] up to you  [ ] no 
  Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [x] none

I've never actually used them myself, but they seem like a great idea if you could avoid getting lynched for using them. I don't think they would go down particularly well in a lot of offices. (I also dislike the wording used, but that's a nit-pick more than a valid criticism.)

EOM is pretty superfluous, though -- it's clear from the fact that there's no more text that I've reached the end of the message.

[1]: http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/19/writing-sensible-email-m...

If they want a reply, they should write a clear question. If it's just long rambling without any apparent question or call to action, how should you respond anyway?

I'm one of those who ignores (or rather, doesn't respond to) more emails than I should. But if it's something really important then people will send me a second email with clear instructions. And after a while they'll learn to do so in the first email.

I'm in complete agreement with you: if they just spent a little time up front writing clear, concise emails, it would save a lot of trouble down the line. As it is, though, they don't, so hacks like that act as a sort of triage for the problem.

I've tried, without success, the `ignore until clear' tactic, but it tends to result in me getting the blame for not replying.

"EOM is pretty superfluous, though -- it's clear from the fact that there's no more text that I've reached the end of the message."

Originally the idea was to put EOM at the end of the subject line when the whole message fit in the subject. That way you didn't have to 'open' the email. Never made much sense to me, since the process of 'opening' an email doesn't cost more than the effort to select the subject, but maybe it depends on the email client - I can see how one on a 800x600 screen may use an email client that shows the message list in one screen, and the body in another.

Sounds similar to NT (No Text) on usenet...

It is NNTR sorry about the typo. You think most people would be like you but most aren't in our experience. It's the simple emails that just say 'thanks' that add to the clutter.

Cue swapping of personal email addresses... Most people can't be available on their phone all the time, meetings etc. A large part of email's popularity is that you can communicate with people without having to both be available at the same time. The only other option is to leave lots of voicemails and that's way more inefficient than email.

This article does not sound like an "experiment". It seems to describe a zealous manifesto against email.

Also, the core business of Yolk Recruitment is literally people. So, there is an inherent value bias for them to use the most direct and immediate forms of communications as often as possible.

"OK, I'll email you my CV"

"Err, you can't"

This is brilliant. I volunteer for IEEE and am presently Chairing a conference to be held in July. Sometimes our email loop keep going. I am going to follow this for the volunteer group!

Another attempt at throwing the bath water out with the baby.

If people are not using email correctly, try training them! Email is more than just a create and a reply button.

We are training you've just got sometimes start new

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