I think it's fantastic that people are finally starting to talk admit the fact that e-mail is not only part of the problem, it's THE problem. It's a system that works only in the most light usage pattern, and brakes the moment you try to scale it beyond a handful of messages a day. Every person I've been talking to this about recently agrees that e-mail creates more problems than it solves. So why do we keep using it?

I was reading Mike Musgrove's Washington Post piece called E-mail reply to all: ‘Leave me alone!’ (partially because I'm quoted in it - although only briefly as what I had to say seems to be counter to the theme of the piece) and I can't help but think that people are really missing the point here. This is how the article starts:

Last month, venture capitalist Fred Wilson drew a lot of attention on the Internet when he declared a 21st century kind of bankruptcy. In a posting on his blog about technology, Wilson announced he was giving up on responding to all the e-mail piled up in his inbox.

"I am so far behind on e-mail that I am declaring bankruptcy," he wrote. "If you've sent me an e-mail (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again. I am starting over."

That's a similar tone repeated in the story and in fact waved around a bit as if there is some wisdom there. There's not. There's nothing inspired about realizing something is not working, giving up on it entirely, and then starting over again with the exact same system. E-mail itself is the problem so deleting all of your unread messages and adopting Lessig's "I'm sorry, I'll try harder next time" approach isn't going to change a thing. It's going to put you right back in the same situation X months down the line. This isn't meant to be a knock on Wilson on Lessig, they have clearly isolated the source of the problem, they just aren't taking the fix far enough.

People use e-mail because other people use it. If some people don't use it, and people want to communicate with them, they have to find another means to do that. In all but a very few cases (super close friends and cute girls) I've stopped having conversations in e-mails. I'll take the information that is sent to me and process it, or send some of my own, but the days of 25 e-mails back and forth with me and one other person over a 2-3 hour time span are gone. Conversations can take place any number of other technologies that are better suited for them - IM, phone, a comment thread on a blog, etc. E-mail is the worst technological option for having a discussion but the reason they keeps happening there is because everyone keeps playing the game. Well, the game is stupid and tired and not fun anymore so why do we keep on keeping on?

I mentioned I've stopped doing a lot of this and guess what? There's not a single conversation that I need to have that I haven't been able to. It's simply shifted to one of the other avenues that I am willing to have conversations in. And these conversations more, well, conversational, I get more out of them and they happen quicker. So why would I ever go back to endless back and forth over e-mail? There's no reason I would and it's because I took that step that I realized this. Also, a happy side effect, is cutting out the back and forth of e-mail had literally halved my e-mail intake a day. Maybe more than that. It's definitely a step in the right direction. This is the direction we need to move in - not just repeating the same errors over and over again.

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