aloga

I am normally involved in several research projects, collaborating with people across Europe. This means that I am used to work with distributed teams scattered in different countries, with different working hours and (sometimes) different time zones.

Until today the main means of communication in this highly distributed environment has been the email (and by extension, mailing lists). This has been working almost perfectly, complementing email communication with online meetings and instant messaging when needed.

Email exchange is a form of asynchronous communication. You write an email whenver you want, the recipient replies to it whenever possible. This can be within a few minutes, hours, or days; but it is something at the receiver's discretion to choose the most appropriate moment to write a reply to your message. Similarly, senders are expeted to write emails whenever they can or they want, and they should not expect an immediate reply. The sender should understand that email is async, not being impatient if a rely is not within a few moments.

All of this means that, assuming that you do not have annoying notifications enabled, there is not a single distraction when receiving an email, until you explicitly check your inbox.

This has an important consequence: email (and async) communications do not interrupt your work. You can focus your attention on complex tasks without any distraction at all. A context switch from one task to a completely different one is a costly process, and getting back to the initial point requires a lot of effort (this has been quantified). When you are working (at least when I am working) you need interruption-tight slots of time to get things properly done.

Asynchronous communication also means that you can elaborate responses with time, reflect on your thoughts and write a proper respose. You can work on them offline, find references, start composing a message and complete it later on, and similar things.

Recently (well, not so recently actually) Slack and alike (Mattermost, Teams, Skype, Gitter and so on and so forth) entered the scene. These supercharged chat systems promised to kill the email, but rather they have killed our productivity and our capacity of concentration. Synchronous communication means that you expect to get the recipient's attention within a few moments, if you do not get it you start feeling frustrated. Rings, bells, whistles, flashes are used and abused in order to get your focus, distracting you from your current task, just to ask you a thing that 99% of the times is not so urgent. Emails are sent to remind you that you missed a message. All these systems are designed to capture your attention and to reward you whenever they got it, regardless if you are a receiver (removing that large bubble with a count of unread messages feels good, you get a new dopamine shot), or a sender (getting a reply within a few seconds).

This does not mean that synchronous communication should not be used, as it is perfect for some things like holding meetings (I tend to prefer text meetings rather than teleconferences, but it seems that I am alone in this), carry out some work that requires synchronous communication (debugging remote systems that require manual actions), or to make a break on your work; but they cannot simply replace good old plain text email.

Moreover, email is just email. It is always the same. You can have several accounts, but in the end you probably will end up using a Mail User Agent (MUA) where you go to check your email. Instant messaging is a different thing. I am now sitting in my laptop, and just checked the number of applications that I have enabled: IRC, Skype, Mattermost (with 2 teams), Slack (2 teams) and Microsoft Teams. In the past, much to my dismay, I had to use 2 more Slack channels and Gitter.

Email is not a synchronous way of communication, and you should not expect it to behave like that. Interruption at work is unavoidable, but it should not been the default and your first option when communicating. Urgent things deserve an interruption, normal communications do not. If in doubt, just send an email.

Some more readings: Evil UX patterns for attention seeking apps. and Wired: How Slack ruined work.