A path to a better email experience

Picture yourself driving in your car through a city. There are a lot of cars on the road, and you have to go a few miles to get to your destination.

Now picture that you’re coming up to an intersection, and you’re watching the light go from green to red, and back to green again. There were a lot of things going on in the intersection — lots of cars, lots of people turning, etc., but you didn’t have to pay attention to all of it. You mostly watched the lights and followed it when it told you that you could go through.

Now, picture that same drive, but there’s a power outage and the stoplight is blinking red or it’s not on. As you drive up, there’s a backup of cars in all directions. When you finally get up to the line, you’re having to watch cars on both sides, in the left and right turn lanes, and next to you. It’s your job to figure out who stopped first, who is going next, and if each car’s trajectory will take them into your lane or not. The more cars and lanes involved, the trickier it can get. And hopefully, the power won’t be out for all intersections on your route, because your trip will take a lot longer.

I want to call attention to something going on in these scenarios: what are you thinking about? There’s a pretty big difference in what your brain is doing in each intersection, isn’t there? It’s a bit strange how something simple like a stoplight can take such a big burden off of your brain.

Remember that feeling of being in the intersection when the lights aren’t working? What you’re experiencing is high mental load, where you’re having to deal with a lot of mental calculations. This is a lot like email. In email, you’re responsible to read hundreds of emails per day, determine which ones you need to work on, record those things for later, follow up with people on emails that you’ve sent out, etc etc — it’s a very high mental load work process. It’s like living in a place where all the stoplights are broken, all the time.

When you’re in a place of high mental load, day after day — you get used to it, and find a way to deal with it. But you may have this voice in the back of your mind saying “does it have to be this way? Is there something that can take a load off?” I want to speak to the part of you that thinks something is wrong — and say: Yes, something is wrong! No, you shouldn’t have to handle this much mental load, day after day. And yes, there is a better way!

The Better Way

In the roadway system, stoplights, turn lanes and speed limits all come together to take a high-mental load environment and make it low-mental load. In a previous article, I went over how the traffic system does this, and how a solution for email’s problems will look similar.

We built a product that does this for email. It’s name is kit. It has 3 main goals:

1. Establish a new set of rules and behaviors for people using email to follow.
2. Assist people in the required behavior changes.
3. Reduce the “mental effort” (cognitive weight) of working in email.

Goal 1: Why we need a new standard

Think about email from a “big picture” view. Don’t just think of your inbox. Picture thousands of people emailing each other, receiving things, waiting on others, following up. Hundreds of thousands of emails zip back and forth as people connect with each other over and over. It’s like looking at a city from 10,000 feet up, and watching the flow of traffic across it all. In a city, you could see the intersections where the stoplights were out — you’d see slowdown affecting thousands of people, and you could see the ripple effect as it caused problems elsewhere in the city. In an organization, slowdowns caused by email look the same way; they affect teams, projects, and the bottom line.

These slowdowns need to be fixed, and it’s easy to find them because they’re everywhere in email. But to find what is causing the slowdowns is a lot more difficult. To solve this, we had to look beyond technology itself. We discovered that we had to look at the people.

Think of some of the ways other people slow you down in email. They send unclear emails, CC you when it’s not necessary, ignore or miss emails you sent, forget to do what you asked… and for each of these, you have to spend extra time to work around it. People’s behaviors in email cause slowdowns for others and, by ripple effect, cause slowdowns in an organization.

Another group who saw people’s behaviors as a main cause of email overload was Chris Anderson with TED. He came up with the Email Charter to solve what they call the “email spiral”, or constantly increasing email overload. It was specifically focused on changing people’s sending behavior, by giving 10 rules for people to follow while they’re sending emails. The outcome of the new behavior is that emails are easier to process, and there are less of them. The big-picture outcome is that when the behavior changes are implemented across an organization, it will “reverse the email spiral”.

Kit’s first goal is not to change email, but to change the people’s behaviors in email. New behaviors are expected from the users, from sending a clear request in email, to not forgetting other’s work, to clearly communicating when you will do something and when you are completed. These behaviors are designed to prevent problems in other people’s workflow and allow them to get work done easier. They work out email’s workflow kinks and bring about a steady “flow”. When you multiply these behaviors across an organization, the overall slowdown points will dissipate.

Goal 2: Assisting the behavior changes

We need to be realistic. If we just give people new rules to follow when they’re already burdened, that could make things worse. How can we bring about behavior change without blowing up an overloaded environment?

The key can be found in the roadway system, because it already dealt with this problem. The roadway system establishes a new set of behavior changes, but it doesn’t just dump a bunch of rules on people. It also brings visual reminders and guides where applicable, so people don’t have to perfectly remember the new behavior standards themselves.

Think about it — how would the rules of the road operate without visual reminders? What is “signal when changing lanes” without the lines on the road to show where lanes are? What is “drive a safe speed” without speed limit signs? In order to modify people’s behavior, you need visual assistance at the point it is needed to guide you into the new behaviors.

So in kit, when new behaviors need to be followed, it will guide the person into following those behaviors. For example:

• As you are writing an email, kit gives guidance on writing clear emails.
• As you find work to do in the inbox, kit guides you into quickly communicating back to the sender.

So again, kit doesn’t just give people the rules. It guides them into making those behavior changes, without them even knowing they’re benefiting the greater good.

Goal 3: Reduce the mental effort

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If we can’t reduce people’s mental load while working in email, then who cares how great of a system is created? This is where kit shines.

Instead of having to read through the emails in your inbox to find where you’ve been asked things to do, kit can show you where those are for you, and give you a short summary on each one.

Instead of reading through hundreds of CC’d emails to figure out what your team is doing, kit will summarize the actions going on in them. With this, you can quickly find out how a project is running and where help is needed.

Instead of having to remember or flag things you have to do, kit automatically keeps track of things you’ve been asked, keeping those things organized for you and helping you take each one all the way to completion.

Instead of you having to keep tabs on everyone you’re asking things of, kit keeps track of everything you’ve asked others to do. It keeps track of your requests for the recipient as well, so they don’t forget about it or lose it. It then gives you updates on the status of the work — when the person accepts your request and when they complete it, so you’re always on the same page with people you’re working with.

These are all serious mental load reducers.

How does it do all this? Well, let’s go back to the stoplight again. The stoplight works in a system where people’s behaviors are already changed, and it works with those new behaviors to produce a great benefit for everyone: reduced mental load.

Kit’s primary goal is to change people’s behaviors. With those changed behaviors, it is able to use technology to bring about features that cause reduced mental load. So for kit, behavior change +technical solution = low mental load, just like the stoplight.

Living in a world with the new standard

We don’t just want to fix the problem. We want to bring about a new reality that people never dreamed of.

Picture an office where people can work together efficiently, without slogging through piles of email to find the work they’ve been asked to do… where work doesn’t fall through the cracks, causing whole teams to slow down.

That’s what we envision. But we see more, too. We want to give you that 10,000-foot view of a company, so you can see what’s going on and how you fit into the big picture. With kit, you can tell how people are working together on different projects, when departments got involved and what they’re working on, see overall workload levels, and get a snapshot of who is working with external customers and vendors. It’s the kind of information that’s only available now by asking everyone what they’re doing… but with kit, you can get it objectively, through analytic reporting.

We also envision work relationships becoming better. It’s been shown that overuse of email causes trust problems between co-workers. How can we solve that? The answer is in one of our favorite quotes: “one of the fastest ways to restore trust is to make and keep commitments — even very small commitments — to ourselves and others.”* (emphasis mine) With kit, as we’ve shown, people are guided into making and keeping commitments to others.

So, our vision for the future with email is very, very bright. What email is now is a shadow of what it can be. To begin your bright future in email, check out kit in action.

*Stephen M R Covey, The Speed of Trust