E-mail sucks for collaboration, but we still use it, why?

Little disclosure here.  I have a love-hate relationship with e-mail.  I love getting e-mail, I use it all the time.  I even have this little black device named after a fruit to get it on the go, but … But I HATE e-mail as a collaboration tool.  I know I’m not the only one.  Jack started tapping into this on a post linking to a couple others.  Now I couldn’t get to the second post (I’m linking to it here in hopes that it does rise from the dead), but the post on LibraryClips has some great quotable quotes.

My friend Luis has a lot to say about e-mail and collaboration … like this gem:

 … the reasons email is still popular are: laziness, fear, control, culture, group mind …

Yeah, no doubt.

Anne Zelenka is quoted with this con for e-mail

“Everyone has to manage their own archives. New team members don’t have easy access to old discussions and shared documents. People lose or delete information that turns out to be important. Stakeholders get mistakenly or purposefully left out of discussions. Email inboxes get flooded with information their owners don’t need to see.”

But this has these real "pros":

Interoperability – sender and receiver can use different clients
Personalised Organisation – store content with your own categories, keep only the content that you want
Easy access control – control on who sees the content
Single point of information access – everything in the inbox, instead of scattered

Really though, I can start to rail on e-mail for collaboration in a hummingbird’s wing beat (which, btw, is much faster than a NY minute).  The problem is that no matter how hard I’ve tried over the past seven plus years (at three different companies) I haven’t been able to break people of the e-mail habit.  It’s just too easy to e-mail I think.  We’ve finally gotten it into our thick skulls to check e-mail often (the people who say they only check it once a week or less … I nearly faint).  We understand the whole schema.  We can attach documents, have faux conversations, so we seem to be collaborating.  The problem is scale.  The problem is versioning.  The problem is …

Oh I can’t go on.  I think the real question shouldn’t be how to get people to stop using e-mail as faux-collaboration, but how to make collaboration systems work like e-mail.

Tags: collaboration, email