The Bright Side of Email

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season with a positive outlook, looking at the bright side of things. In this episode, we are going to look at the bright side of email. Yes, email, that thing that gives you hundreds or maybe thousands of junk mail and spam and all that kind of good stuff on a regular basis. Depending on how good your spam filters are, you're still going to see some of that, and it still can be a pain. There are definitely many, many drawbacks to using email to communicate. However, there's some major positives as well, and I think it's a good time for us to take a look at those. First and foremost, I think we need to understand what email is meant for. Email is not a text message. It is not meant to be a response like, okay, or yep, or something like that. Email is meant a little bit more for a conversation. If your email is, are you at your desk? That's probably a waste of an email. Not very good use of email. You could do that with a text. You could pick up a phone. You could do a lot of different ways to, you know, you could hit them up with a Slack message. Email doesn't need that. That's why, partially, that we have these other things. We have stuff like a text or Slack or Teams or things like that where you can quickly with somebody and it's okay that you have a short term, a very short response, that you used even some sort of abbreviation, like K for okay or U, the letter for Y-O-U, things like that, or emojis. That's not to mean that you can't do those things in email, but really it's best to avoid them. Email is meant for more of a conversation and that's where its strengths are. When you want to put something together that is better than just a casual conversation, when you want to lay out certain points or you have specific questions or details that need to be addressed, email is perfect for that. One of the biggest positives of it is that it's not an instant response. When you get an email, you can take your time and it's best when you do. You don't have to respond within 30 seconds or 60 seconds or five minutes or even five hours actually. Now, some people may disagree and say, no, no, you need to respond immediately. I would say they're wrong. If you look at what's out there, if there is a need to get a hold of somebody quickly, email should not be the tool that's being used. There are other methods that are much more reliable and probably should be at least more likely to get that person wherever they are or whatever they're doing. Email should be the equivalent of setting a note on somebody's desk and they'll get to it when they get to it. And that is one of the huge positives when you take advantage of this, is it allows you to have somebody communicate something to you, whether it's a question or request, and then you have the time to actually put together a full, complete, well thought out, maybe even reviewed response to make sure that what you say in your email is what you need to say, is what you mean to say. Now, there's a lot of people that ignore this and they will rip off an email and cause all sorts of issues. If you take your time and properly craft an email, then it one, adds a level of professionalism to your communications, but it also gives you one of the big strengths of email, which is essentially a paper trail for decisions and discussions. In the old parlance, there was CYA, cover your rear, basically, that was done. People would write letters and they'd have stuff signed and all that kind of goodness. Email does that for us. And it's not just there for a CYA, it's there so that we have something to refer back to, particularly in the software development world. I've heard many, many times that I have referred back to emails because they have key requirements or discussion points or decision points. And yes, we have other places that we can store those and there's nothing wrong with that. We can put it out in bug tickets or we can have some sort of a wiki site. There's things like that. Email is our way to have those conversations and have everybody, hopefully, be provided enough time to really think through the response. And this is incredibly valuable to us. If you look at things like Twitter and text messages in general, particularly look at some of the sites that have funny text conversations based on typos and spelling errors and things like that. Email allows you to actually write a letter, proper grammar, proper spelling, flow, and to actually address the points you need to address. This is, again, very valuable. It's also a great opportunity for you to show that you have the ability to do that, that you can think through stuff. One of the most frustrating things I've dealt with are situations where you send somebody an email and you lay out maybe very clearly. Maybe there's like numeral versions of bullet points or bullet points that say, I need to know A, B, C, and D, or it may even be numbered one, two, three, and four. When the response you get back, maybe answer is number three and that's it. That's somebody that didn't spend the time and properly use email. When you do have it, it allows you instead of even as you would in a conversation, you can easily get lost in a conversation, particularly if somebody is going rather quickly through multiple points. The things can get lost in translation. They can fall through the cracks because you're focusing on one or two points and you forget about or maybe just totally spaced a couple of those points. Email allows you to slow that down and have a very methodical and well thought out conversation. The other thing is it allows us to, I want to say have difficult conversations and that's the point, but it's not, I don't want to imply that email allows us to get around face to face and personal difficult conversations. If you want to break up with your long time partner, you don't do it through an email. You need to do it face to face. However, if you need to direct somebody in a way that is very detailed, and I mean difficult conversations as far as there are a lot of complexities to them, not necessarily that it's just we don't feel, we think we're going to hurt their feelings or it's going to hurt our feelings. I'm talking more the difficult conversations where there's just a lot of complexity, a lot of details. Email allows us to do that and make sure that we have covered all of those details. If you think of some of the most common uses, it's exactly what they do. We get invoices. When we do some online transactions, we get an invoice, we get a sales receipt. We had an email that says, this is what you bought. This is what you bought. This is the day you did it. Here are the instructions for how to retrieve it or when you can expect it. Those kinds of things are because they want or if we're sending that out for an e-commerce site, we want to send that out to somebody to say, OK, let's make sure you're clear. This is what you just did. And that's very important and valuable. That's a huge positive to it. I know some of us, it's like receipts and things like that. We won't really, we don't really pay attention to them. We'll just get it. We'll say, oh, yeah, I just ordered something on Amazon. Here I just got my confirmation email. No big deal. Now, really, what you should do is when you get that confirmation email is go take a look at it and see what it says. Good example. Recently, because you can't try stuff on, I got some clothes in a store and it looked right and it had like the right size thing on it. And then if I had looked at the receipt, which the email that I got, if I'd looked at that, I would have seen that it was I bought something that was a boy's size and not a man's size, which makes it very uncomfortable for me if I had put that, you know, if I'd been able to even wear that. But that's a problem. That's my problem is because I got the email and I didn't read it properly. Now, that's a minor thing, but think about it from a business point of view. This is a great way to communicate with customers and make sure that you use very precise language, that you cover all of your bases. It's a great way to work with coworkers. And a great habit actually related to this is when you have conversations and meetings is to follow it up, is to have an email that says, this is what we talked about. This is what was covered. Here's a summary of our meeting. We get to document in a way that everybody can look at it and everybody can agree or disagree. If there's something that's not right or something's missed, then it gives everybody opportunity to correct that. It's a huge positive of email. And now you may get the sense as you're, you know, as we're going through this, some of the positives of email that really the negatives of email seem to arise more from people not using it as it was intended or not understanding how to use it as opposed to properly using it. Spam is another great example of people not using it right. Now while there is a positive side that you can use email to market people, you can provide them some incredible information about what it is that you sell and how it's a fit for them. You can reach large numbers of people quickly. But if you're doing it just to, you know, throw something in their face and say, hey, you're not doing it right. But the positive is if I've got something and this is again, something I've done quite a bit. If I've got a product or something that is not simple, you know, it's not as simple as like, I don't know, buying an apple with us, not the Apple computer, but the fruit or grabbing an orange off the grocery store or a box of cereal or something like that. If it's buying a computer or a piece of software or, I don't know, maybe an insurance policy or health, you know, health insurance or a job offer. All of these things have a lot of details. And those are the things where a lot of times I'll say, hey, can you send me an email with that information on it? So I'm not sitting there in their face to face with them trying to work through all of the different details. Instead, I can at my leisure sit back, dig through it and make sure that it has the details that I need. I can ask the right questions. That's a huge positive. I know that there's a negative of being marketed to all the time in emails, but when it's done right, it's quite the positive. It allows us to really make informed decisions. Again, if they're done right. And it is another positive that is used somewhat. It's a great way to put a couple of documents together and send somebody that is a great way to basically package up some electronic data and send it. There's other ways you can do it. I know you can you could just send them a link on, you know, like your Dropbox or something like that. It is very useful to attach something. And I know there's places where you know that's not right. You don't want to do that. It's too much size. It's a big email, all that kind of crud. But there are value in having those kinds of things attached. So you get an email, you've got maybe a cover letter effectively, and then you've got some documents you can look at all of them. You can get all that stuff together. You can work with it as a bunch. The tools that exist are actually pretty big positives. If you just got snail mail, you would have folders, maybe probably you'd have folders and you'd have inboxes and outboxes that you'd shove all your mail in and a trash can as well that you'd shove all your mail in. But in the electronic world, all that email, you can search it to some extent, almost every client, every email client, I want to say everyone does have search. I know some don't and some have pretty lame search, but at least they have something. And if you use a lot of these things that are free and you've got to watch what you're doing with them. But if you use like Google Mail or something like that, then you've got some little more advanced search tools. And you can if you want to spend some money, usually you can find a tool that's actually really nice, but also the really good ones for the most part, you're usually going to have to pay a little money for. That being said, there are definitely some good ones out there that are free too that you can get or that come with the operating system, things like that. And that's really valuable over a long period of time. Initially, you get a couple of emails, no big deal. When you start getting into a project and you've got hundreds or thousands of emails related to that project and you haven't been able to pull that information out into like a wiki site or something like that, it's really nice to be able to go searching. Or when you know that we had that conversation and we made a decision, but we never really wrote that down somewhere, you can go searching and figure out what it was and go dig up that email. It doesn't always happen, but it happened. It's good. It works often enough to make it a solid positive. Not to mention the whole, it goes back a little bit to the CYA, but it's the stuff where you can say, oh yeah, I did send that email on such and such a date at this time. You can go back and say, oops, I forgot to send you that or wait, I did send you that. And that is something you don't get from a face-to-face conversation. If you go back, try to think about what conversation you had a week ago, you may or may not remember that you covered that topic or you didn't cover that topic or you brought up that critical point or you forgot to bring up that critical point. This doesn't mean that you're forgetful or old age or doddering or anything like that. It just means that you're human. We have a lot of stuff going on in our head. And some of us, some people I think can pinpoint every second of every conversation to some point, but I think for most of us, there's things that we think we said and we didn't or we thought we said it a certain way and we didn't. Email allows us to eliminate that. Now it does take the emotion out of stuff, even with emojis and stuff like that. It's hard to use, for example, sarcasm and things like that with an email, but that's not necessarily a major loss because again, let's go back to the idea of having a meaningful conversation being the primary purpose of email. Then when we can spend our time parsing and replying fully, it gives us that positive of being able to have a meaningful conversation with multiple people at a time. That being said, let's get to the challenge of the week. Challenge of the week, do you use email properly? Or could the emails you've sent out in the last day, the last week, how many did you actually spend some time and put together a solid formal type of response? And how often do you just whip out a quick reply of, yeah, I got that or something like that? Now there are situations where it is a short reply. You're just confirming that you got it. But there's also a lot of them where you probably were expected to put together more than a one or two word response. And whether you use short responses or long responses, it is time to get back to work. So as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoir.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together.