Get personal Email!
 

Michael J. Yacavone

Introduction
Since I started using email on a daily basis in 1988, I'm sometimes surprised when someone says they're not sure if they need their own email address. Perhaps they can share one with their spouse, or get a single corporate account instead of one for each person in the office. This white paper addresses why I think that each person should have their own email account. I am speaking here primarily of office workers, but if you get past this first paragraph you can probably make the jump to family life pretty easily.

Costs Less, Does More
For a fixed monthly fee, you get unlimited use of email. Contrast this with the per-minute cost of a fax or phone call which emphisze short communication, rather than effective communication). Ever play phone tag? Eliminated with email ? it'll be there when you are ready. You can check your email from anywhere in the world, which is often handy if you travel. Finally, email cuts across time zones and flexible work shifts. Email is a productive tool for employees.

Personal Access
While you might share a phone with your spouse, you probably have more than one phone in the house. It's easier that way. It is a rare office that has only one phone and share it among more than two people. Personal email simply provides personal access to email services.

Personal Privacy
You might ask, "Why should anything in this office be private? The work is shared, so is the correspondence." You might also ask, "Why use envelopes? Postcards are fine." The fact is, many aspects of getting work done do not involve the whole office. It is sometimes much easier, faster, and more effective for you to pick up the phone and say, "Sue? Please paint the widget number 545 blue, instead of number 325 blue," rather than saying to your assistant, "Joel, please call Sue over at QuickPaint and ask her to paint the widget number 545 blue instead of number 325 blue."

Joel might have other things to do. Joel might make an error hearing the message, or speaking to Sue, causing a deadline nightmare and obvious communication breakdown. Or, better yet, without doing such work as relaying messages for others, Joel might more fully realize his human capacity for creativity and bettering the world (or at least the workplace). It certainly won't happen if he is only passing messages.

Inter-Office Communication
Email is great for keeping track of details. Instead of having a quick conversation that rambles over several points of follow-up, a quick email with a punch list of action items works much better. Save the personal time for extended conversations where interaction and subtleties matter.

Email provides a written record of requests and action (no more he-said she-said). It lasts for a long time (longer than even uber-spy Oliver North realized). It's quick, easy, precise, and obvious.

Mailing Lists
A great aspect of internet communications is the mailing list. A mailing list is when someone says, "I want to talk to other people about how this PhotoShop program really works. I will start a mailing list, which other people can sign up to receive, where we'll talk about our questions and provide help to other people. It will take me 15 minutes each day to read the list, and if I desire, another 15 minutes to reply to people who I think I can help. It will be good for everyone."

There are mailing lists on every conceivable topic. Internet advertising, the best camera to buy, how to make orchids bloom in 40 degree weather, whatever. Sure, some will be of personal interest, of no use to the company. So what? It takes virtually zero company resources, and much less employee time than 5 phone calls a day from their spouse or latch-key kid. Besides, an engaged, well-rounded person is a better employee.

If you have yourself a 5 person office, and each person signs up for a couple of lists, all of a sudden someone is printing out a whole lot of email, cutting down trees to make paper, and generally grumbling about the excessive use of email. If it stays electronic, it's easier to manage, requires less resources, and can be responded to by clicking a button.

Web Sites
Web sites usually require email addresses if you want anything useful out of them. Sure, you can use your single corporate email address, and when Bill in purchasing wants vendor info, Joel is happy to print it out for him. That is, if the email mentions that Bill requested the information. If it doesn't, Joel says, "Who's this for???" and throws it out. Meanwhile, over in Purchasing, Bill thinks the vendor is bogus because they don't respond to email.

Email Volume
If you only get a couple of emails a day, who cares about personal email. But if you start using email, and you're like most office workers, you'll find yourself getting several messages a day. If you're in a customer-focused business like the internet or advertising or manufacturing or professional services you might find that you get dozens if not many dozens of messages every day. All of a sudden, a single person can't manage a few hundred emails for a whole office, and someone is blaming email for wasting their time, instead of blaming a mis-application of human resources. Email is cheap compared to people.

Receiver Convenience
Yes, you can yell across a room to your co-worker. Or, you can pick up the phone and give them a call. In both cases, the co-worker is interrupted from whatever work they happen to be doing at the moment. This is largely a cultural difference ? in Japan, when a co-worker sees someone sitting still, thinking, they say, "Shhh, Steve-san is thinking. I will interrupt him later." In America, where decisive action is valued above anything else, a person thinking quietly is a ripe target for some additional action items foisted upon them by action-oriented co-workers. Sometimes that's okay, unless Steve-san has just realized a way to save the company half a million dollars and the interruption distracts him and he forgets the thought.

Email solves all of this. It is receiver-friendly. The sender sends when it is convenient to them, and the receiver checks their email when it is convenient to them. The interruption factor plumits, more work gets done, more money is made, raises are given, and new cars are bought. Everyone is happy ? all because of email.

Project Management
Particularly in the digital age, managing a project involves a lot of details and iterative workflow. It works much better when the specific worker at a vendor site can communicate with a specific person at the client site. Certainly this is how the phone works. Email doesn't replace the phone, but it augments it rather well. When critiquing a rough draft or a nearly final proof, a specific list of comments is very helpful.

Precision of Thought
Writing your thoughts is inherently more precise than speaking. You get to edit, expand, or otherwise clarify your thinking. Yeah, it takes a bit more time, but if there is anything I've observed about business in America, it is that a bit more precision might be a good idea. It is rare when you have too much communication. Most often, communication is lacking. Email provides another avenue, and a more precise one at that. Can this be all bad?

People to People
Ultimately, people talk to other people. Sure, the "corporation" gets the work done, and sometimes people cover for one another when the office is busy. But when it comes right down to it, the customer wants to talk to a person to have their work done, not a "customer service representative." When you go to the hospital, would you like to hear, "Hello Ms. #001-78-5555!" or rather, "Hi Sue. How are you today."

The Digital Age
Email facilitates better person-to-person communication. It sits between the phone and the letter in terms of urgency and detail. It is simply another form of communication, and is well-suited to the demands of a modern work-place. Having lived with daily email for over nine years, I can't imagine how work gets done without it. Perhaps this is one reason why the internet is growing so rapidly. People get more done, in less time, in a digital economy.

Basically, my thinking is that if you want to play with computers and work with other people, personal email is a requirement of the modern age.