The Issues With eMail

A quick note at the top that I’m off next Friday, and as you know when I’m off this site is off, too. I’ll be back the following week, to celebrate the end of May.

Put plainly, eMail is awful. The medium is functionally frozen from an internet age that is digitally ancient. It’s not just me saying this; it’s pretty much everyone. Depending on the day you catch me on the topic, I might even agree with folks who say it’s “broken.”

So let’s move on to something else, right?

{Insert rim shot here}

For all of its many problems, eMail isn’t going anywhere in education, particularly in educational administration. I don’t know how many I get per day (I will shortly), but it’s a crazy amount. I guess I’ll get more than 10,000 work-related eMails over the course of this year alone. Nuts.

I’m also going to send a TON of eMails this year. Certainly, more than I ever have before. I’d guess an average week brings my staff at least ten eMails from me. That’s a lot of eMail-based attention that I am asking for (functionally demanding from you if you are below me on the org-chart). Also nuts.

But for all of this, there isn’t any clear solution. No tool is anywhere near as ubiquitous for the various “management communication” purposes that are needed in schools. I am not hyperbolic when I say that I do not know how I would work without being able to eMail. It would make me significantly less productive. It would destroy my meetings by turning them back into laundry lists. People would hate working with that version of me. Not to say that there was not a pre-eMail version of my job that was accomplished successfully by the various pre-mes who did it, but those days are long gone. Any administrator who does not use eMail at this point is not someone who should still be an administrator. Maybe with that in mind, there are at least a series of guidelines that we might refer to when considering how to use eMail in an efficient and humane way? Nope. Different sources offer conflicting “best practices” for eMail management and administration. I’m not clear of any evidentiary basis for any of them outside of “this works for me” as mapped against “this is what I prefer.”

So should we just despair and wallow in a world that is constantly buffeted by eMail furiously scribbling them off into the digital wind as needed to let us do our work? I don’t think so. I’m sure there are some things that we can do to keep eMail from getting out of hand. I have some thoughts here (as do so very many other people), but I have to confess that at current I am still WAY too much of a work in progress in my own eMail consumption/production for my job to be at all comfortable putting any formal thoughts on the page about this just yet. Maybe someday, but not too soon. And not during May. May is a crazy month.

Do you have any eMail tips or tricks that you want to share? Maybe you take issue with everything you have read here to this point in this piece? Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts. Together we might slay this eMail beast.