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Whenever you write an email, you should envision how it'll read as evidence in a court transcript. Envision a jury reading over your shoulder. That's essentia
by unoti 11y ago
Whenever you write an email, you should envision how it'll read as evidence in a court transcript. Envision a jury reading over your shoulder. That's essentially what will happen if there's a preservation order and a court case.
This is just one of tons of reasons why email is overused. Live, interactive, two-way conversations are better for most things. Making better use of interactive conversations does require some planning and discipline, to keep a list of what you need to discuss sorted by person. But the benefits of that practice are numerous, and increased privacy and plausible deniability is a comparatively minor benefit.
A few reasons to prefer interactive discussion to email:
- plausible deniability and increased security
- reduced chance of misunderstanding
- less time spent and potentially wasted carefully crafting the perfect message, because you can monitor your recipients reactions in real time and dynamically alter your delivery depending on which parts are immediately understood and agreed upon
- collaborate on the ideas interactively and rapidly, rather than a simple one way transfer
Email is good for some things, but it's seriously overused.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- loup-vaillant 11y agoThen, once the interactive discussion is done and a decision is made, make sure to write it down in an email. Covering your ass is often more important than covering your tracks.
- protomyth 11y agoI had this illustrated to me early in my career in a mostly harmless way. I worked on an early-childhood / social work combo grant program as a "Data Consultant"[1]. We were in a building that had celebrated its 100th year, and it had one bathroom. The nurse had accused the males of "poor aiming". In a memo about fairly normal stuff, I included a paragraph in my status rebuking this claim and pointing out we have young children using the bathroom who might not be quite up to our level. I also pointed out this would be something that the early childhood people might need to work on with the children. I am pretty sure every word of it was viewable by a nun since we had one on staff. I was a very sarcastic person and not a bad writer of tales at the time. About two weeks later, I got a call from the assistant project officer inquiring about this bit of information. He also informed me all of our correspondence internal to the program was reviewed by the project office in DC and a section of my memo was "well reviewed" in said office. Given the data requirements, I am pretty sure there is a box in a warehouse with this memo in it. Since then, I write e-mails and memos like they will be reviewed. 1) It was a research grant and they needed help with data reporting and I sure as heck didn't come up with that title.