5 ms·

I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc bel

I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it. The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

alanfranzoni 8y ago
Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.
- throwaway1555 8y ago
  The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.
- keithnz 8y ago
  I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system We use slack very lightly, - most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls - copy pasting things to other people - a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss - prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc - telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.
- rrdharan 8y ago
  I think if you ask Slack about that they'll happily tell you about Slack Grid. EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-can-work-with-anyone-in-slack https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...
philwelch 8y ago
"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime" Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the additional cost of making all of that time strictly synchronous can grow exponentially. It also excludes large categories of people, including introverts and non-native speakers. I've worked with a number of people who just flat out did not or could not participate in real-time face-to-face discussions, but who could express themselves masterfully via email. Of course, the "faster! instant! now! now! now!" crowd don't even have the patience for slower, deeper, better-reasoned discussions, which is why they shy away from any form of communication that has any more depth than a tweet or a PowerPoint slide. Slack is great for these people because they don't even have to string words together to communicate, they can just click on a reaction emoji. Sure, some things (operations, for instance) have genuine urgency to them, and I think real-time communication is essential for situations like that. But if you're doing work that will have an impact on the span of months, quarters, or years--either major strategic business decisions, design, or project development--you're better served by thinking deeper instead of thinking faster, and deep thought is exactly what the long-form written word was invented for.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.
  - samstave 8y ago
    One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount of information. There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not. Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating at 100% all the time. Goofin off is healthy
porker 8y ago
> The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened. I think the attraction of email is it looks like it short-circuits the need for this. "It's all in writing in the email trail" makes moving fast look easy (no realtime meeting that then has to be written up, the document amended on people's feedback etc). But understanding is missing and misunderstanding happens. I'm starting to move an organisation's planning from emails into meetings and specifications. They are resisting massively because it "wastes" time. Given every project up to now has changed spec twice after launch, I see time being saved if it's correct at launch.
qznc 8y ago
I'm in the same camp. In my company there is so much knowledge hidden in inboxes that should be available and searchable by everybody instead. I ask my colleague and be forwards me an email thread from three months ago where I was not included. This is inefficient.
eadmund 8y ago
> Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). I wonder how much of this attitude is a result of poor email client UIs. I switched over to using notmuch for my mail about a year ago, and I now consider email to be a great place for discussions: I can search my entire history almost instantaneously, far faster than with Gmail or Inbox. > The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened. I definitely agree here. This falls under the heading of 'things we used to know as a society that we've forgotten.' Every meeting should have an agenda, even it's just a single agendum 'discuss $FOO,' and every meeting should have some sort of minutes, even if they're just 'discussed $FOO, decided to pursue course $BAR.'

alanfranzoni 8y ago

Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.

throwaway1555 8y ago
The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.
keithnz 8y ago
I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system We use slack very lightly, - most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls - copy pasting things to other people - a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss - prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc - telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.
rrdharan 8y ago
I think if you ask Slack about that they'll happily tell you about Slack Grid. EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-can-work-with-anyone-in-slack https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...

philwelch 8y ago

"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime" Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the additional cost of making all of that time strictly synchronous can grow exponentially. It also excludes large categories of people, including introverts and non-native speakers. I've worked with a number of people who just flat out did not or could not participate in real-time face-to-face discussions, but who could express themselves masterfully via email. Of course, the "faster! instant! now! now! now!" crowd don't even have the patience for slower, deeper, better-reasoned discussions, which is why they shy away from any form of communication that has any more depth than a tweet or a PowerPoint slide. Slack is great for these people because they don't even have to string words together to communicate, they can just click on a reaction emoji. Sure, some things (operations, for instance) have genuine urgency to them, and I think real-time communication is essential for situations like that. But if you're doing work that will have an impact on the span of months, quarters, or years--either major strategic business decisions, design, or project development--you're better served by thinking deeper instead of thinking faster, and deep thought is exactly what the long-form written word was invented for.

linuxftw 8y ago
I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.
- samstave 8y ago
  One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount of information. There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not. Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating at 100% all the time. Goofin off is healthy

porker 8y ago

> The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened. I think the attraction of email is it looks like it short-circuits the need for this. "It's all in writing in the email trail" makes moving fast look easy (no realtime meeting that then has to be written up, the document amended on people's feedback etc). But understanding is missing and misunderstanding happens. I'm starting to move an organisation's planning from emails into meetings and specifications. They are resisting massively because it "wastes" time. Given every project up to now has changed spec twice after launch, I see time being saved if it's correct at launch.

qznc 8y ago

I'm in the same camp. In my company there is so much knowledge hidden in inboxes that should be available and searchable by everybody instead. I ask my colleague and be forwards me an email thread from three months ago where I was not included. This is inefficient.

eadmund 8y ago

> Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). I wonder how much of this attitude is a result of poor email client UIs. I switched over to using notmuch for my mail about a year ago, and I now consider email to be a great place for discussions: I can search my entire history almost instantaneously, far faster than with Gmail or Inbox. > The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened. I definitely agree here. This falls under the heading of 'things we used to know as a society that we've forgotten.' Every meeting should have an agenda, even it's just a single agendum 'discuss $FOO,' and every meeting should have some sort of minutes, even if they're just 'discussed $FOO, decided to pursue course $BAR.'