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✉️ Drafting emails in Markdown
As developers, we use Markdown all the time: in documentation, GitHub issues, etc. Pretty much every tool supports it now, except email. With email, we are still stuck with a 2005 MS Word experience. Why Markdown? Once you know the simple s…
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📥 Email is not a workflow
A recent meeting surfaced a problem: BOM changes in the engineering systems were not reliably reaching the production systems. “I told ’em” is how we had been doing things. We told manufacturing about the changes and handed over links to th…
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📧 How to solve the email problem?
How many hours go into just processing email? One reason it’s so consuming: when a message hits the inbox, it feels like it needs a response. It feels like real work. There are several ways to handle the “too much email” problem: Ignore it…
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📝 You can't improve an email
I’ve been moving discussions out of email and into versioned Markdown files. Here’s what I’m noticing. Email has a structural problem: the only options are reply and quote. The original message can never be improved. When someone joins a pr…
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✍️ Effective communication (Written)
For starters, consider Michael Lynch’s “Underused Techniques for Effective Emails”. A few points in summary: Put the most important information first. Use headings, code blocks, and other formatting. Be succinct. Provide context by quoting…
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📧 Top vs bottom posting in email
I was thinking about computing history this morning, and I wonder how many young people even know that bottom posting in email is even a thing? Some of the older OSS projects still have this culture, but I suspect that most emails sent toda…
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✉️ Email filters
Email is an amazing technology – the only widespread decentralized communication tool we have. But most of us are flooded with email. The fundamental problem is when we get emails from so many different sources, projects, and contexts flowi…
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📧 Effective email is either a pointer or notification
Email is the only decentralized communication platform that has widespread usage. And this is more amazing considering it was invented in 1971. Email is an amazing technology and has stood the test of time. However, there are challenges wit…
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📧 Inbox zero
Thanks to a nudge from Khem, I’m back to Inbox-zero. The big question is what to do with emails that need action or have valuable information in them? Some put them in a special folder. Others tag them. Others forward them to lots of people…