Timing is everything

One day, while travelling from office to house, the breathtaking weirdness of it all struck me. Who would have thought that a cost-effective way of sending a bunch of files one half mile up a winding, cow-dunged road in the windswept West of Ireland would involve sending them on a five thousand mile round trip across the full width of the Atlantic and North America combined. Weird.

Thinking about it, I concluded that there were two vital reasons that made this scenario sensible. First, transferring bits on wires makes physical distance essentially immaterial and second, e-mail is a fundamentally asynchronous medium.

Let's focus on the second reason - asynchronicity. I was sending files to myself using a medium (e-mail) that does not require both parties to be present at the same time. This is obviously very useful if you are sending stuff to your future self. In general though, when one party is e-mailing another party, the non-necessity for the recipient to be present is critical. With e-mail, timing is everything. More accurately, the lack of lock-step timing between producer and consumer is what makes e-mail a killer application in business.

In offices all over the world at the moment, e-mail destined for two doors up the corridor is going out of the building, perhaps across continents before arriving at its final destination. Why do we do it? Because physical distance is irrelevant. If the mail server was under the desk, we would still use it rather than walk two doors up the hall to the recipient. It seems to me that a lot of business e-mail has a subtext which reads:

'I find e-mail a useful communication tool because it allows me to deal with many things at once, and to deal with things in an order of my choosing. We can talk on the phone if you like, or even meet at the water cooler but by and large, I prefer e-mail. If you too find that the asynchronous nature of e-mail helps you organize your work and get more done, please respond via e-mail.'.

This all sounds rather positive doesn't it? Yet you know and I know that we are all swimming in e-mails and at times we would like to see the whole thing disappear into the void. Fact is, we can get more done with e-mail. We can keep more balls in the air at the same time than we could do if we used point-to-point phone conversations or water-cooler encounters.

Unfortunately, it is part of our folly as humans that we fill any gaps created by this new efficiency with yet more work. The more we can do, the more we do, the more that is expected of us and so it goes. On and on. The workload remains the same. For this reason alone, take the occasional opportunity to visit the water cooler rather than send another e-mail . Remember that you will crack long before the mail server does.