Durable Information

Email is a wonderful way to communicate. I keep in touch with people I would have long ago neglected because of it. It's almost free. It's fast. It's super convenient. It's flexible, and allows me to send not just my words, but pictures, files, links and even viruses if I'm irresponsible. It's fairly private, and can be totally secure if I choose the right provider and tools. OK, spam is a nightmare, but more or less, email is a great thing for communicating.

Unfortunately, email doesn't cut it for storing information that is durable, a phrase that I'm sort of adopting or making up for the context of this post. By durable I mean the following:

• It needs to be found later by someone other than the email sender or recipient
• It constitutes a record of a decision or other important information that is of interest to a group outside of the email sender or recipient
  
• It is "owned" by someone other than the email sender or recipient.

So rather than elaborating on these cryptic bullet points, here's an example...

I work on a small software project (I am the sole developer) for a client of my employer. The client and I communicate frequently about the state of project tasks, why certain things aren't meeting his needs, etc. This goes on over the course of one "release" of the project, or about six weeks. He emails me, I respond, he responds, etc. Then I find a problem, I fire off a message, he ignores it, we revisit it a month later without remembering much about it... and on and on.

This is typical small company project management, which is to say, it's not being managed. The only way to get a complete picture of what was decided, how it was interpreted, what is left to do, how to login to the FTP server -- whatever -- is to sift through and piece together artifacts from the following:

• My inbox
• My sent items
• The client's inbox
• The client's sent items
• Our IM logs
• Some documents squirreled away on my company's network
• His [My Documents] folder
• etc.

The basic question when people default to blasting emails to think they are communicating effectively is this: Who OWNS THE INFORMATION? I would say the client and my company own the information, not me. So why would I think just leaving it in my inbox is appropriate?

Yes, my company owns my inbox, but that is not the point. The issue is how to reduce the friction created by my laziness. That my company owns the information that I am mismanaging means I am obligated to store these bits of decisions and communications in such a way that it can be found. Found by my managers, auditors, the next developer who takes on this project after I'm on another, the client, QA people so they can tweak a test plan et. al.

At the very least, emails should be saved off to a public folder. This is a pain, however. A good project management tool (such as basecamp) is much preferred for aggregating this type of communication and preserving it. Email should be used for notification or quick comments. Anything more long-lived than spur-of-the-moment has to be put somewhere else. Then it can be searched, prioritized, validated, transferred and generally managed. Durable information, not fleeing bits of conversation scattered across multiple inboxes.