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> Before email, if an executive wanted to talk with his whole organization, he had to get them all in an auditorium. No, before email, the boss would’ve sent a

> Before email, if an executive wanted to talk with his whole organization, he had to get them all in an auditorium. No, before email, the boss would’ve sent a company-wide memo. Email replaced paper-based written communication with digital written communication, and it did/does that very well. It’s only in the last 15 or so years that people have started using email as a replacement for verbal communication, and email is a terrible replacement for verbal communication.

rhelz 3y ago
Even at that, the memo system didn't make wasting everybody's time the default action, and the way of least pain. In the memo system, sending a memo costs you something. You had to hire a secretary who could take the memo and type it up. You had to dictate the memo, so you could hear how stupid or petty you sounded. You could watch the secretary for her reactions--is she enjoying writing it, or is her soul slowly dying at the sheer inanity of what you are dictating? Compare with email: the default path of least pain is to waste everybody's time. In another thread I used the example: You only need to send an email to 563 out of the 1,000 people who are on the department mailing list. Do you A) spend a half hour filtering out the 437 people who don't need the email, or B) just spam the whole list, knowing full well that 437 people are going to waste 5 minutes determining whether it it applies to them? Of course you are going to just spam the whole list. But 437 * 5 minutes is over 36-man hours of wasted time. You wasted as much time as if you had just called in sick for a week. You'd get punished if you didn't show up to work for a week. You might even get punished if your boss sees you wasting so much time filtering out 437 names from a mailing list. But there is absolutely zero cost or consequences to you for wasting a man-week's worth of effort. You did it, and you'll do it again in another half hour, when you need to send another email... But of course, you haven't really saved that half-hour! You more than pay for it because you have to spend 5 hours a day filtering your own email. You don't even realize its wasted time, because it feels like actual work--taking documents from the in-box, stamping them, and putting them in the out-box. That's what office work is, isn't it? THAT is the evil of email. The default, least-cost action is the one which costs the company the most, and externalizes and makes imperceptible that cost.

rhelz 3y ago

Even at that, the memo system didn't make wasting everybody's time the default action, and the way of least pain. In the memo system, sending a memo costs you something. You had to hire a secretary who could take the memo and type it up. You had to dictate the memo, so you could hear how stupid or petty you sounded. You could watch the secretary for her reactions--is she enjoying writing it, or is her soul slowly dying at the sheer inanity of what you are dictating? Compare with email: the default path of least pain is to waste everybody's time. In another thread I used the example: You only need to send an email to 563 out of the 1,000 people who are on the department mailing list. Do you A) spend a half hour filtering out the 437 people who don't need the email, or B) just spam the whole list, knowing full well that 437 people are going to waste 5 minutes determining whether it it applies to them? Of course you are going to just spam the whole list. But 437 * 5 minutes is over 36-man hours of wasted time. You wasted as much time as if you had just called in sick for a week. You'd get punished if you didn't show up to work for a week. You might even get punished if your boss sees you wasting so much time filtering out 437 names from a mailing list. But there is absolutely zero cost or consequences to you for wasting a man-week's worth of effort. You did it, and you'll do it again in another half hour, when you need to send another email... But of course, you haven't really saved that half-hour! You more than pay for it because you have to spend 5 hours a day filtering your own email. You don't even realize its wasted time, because it feels like actual work--taking documents from the in-box, stamping them, and putting them in the out-box. That's what office work is, isn't it? THAT is the evil of email. The default, least-cost action is the one which costs the company the most, and externalizes and makes imperceptible that cost.