Email Needs a Reply-By Date
By: Jesse Hercules
Tags: Productivity, Design Thinking, Design, Workflow, Communication

Email Needs a Reply-By Date

Lean Manufacturing Ideas to Fix Email

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Instant Delivery is Bad Design

In 2003, Blackberry released an exciting new feature — emails would be pushed to arrive instantly at your device. No more need to “check email”. Ding! Here it is. In the smartphone era, emails arrive with a push alert in your notification stack. Desktop clients like Outlook work the same way.

Instant delivery is the model for asynchronous communications of all kinds — Text messages, WhatsApp messages, #Slack notifications, SnapChats. Tech companies compete to deliver the fastest, and be the most synchronized across devices. All messages get our attention — whether urgent, important, or not.

This is terrible design. Humans pick up their phones 80+ times a day, usually in response to an alert or inbound asynchronous communication. Every interruption costs us time and focus. A 3-second interruption doubles mistakes at work. Having a smartphone face-up on the desk leads to a 26% productivity drop.

Messages are shown in the order they were received, with the newest on the top of the stack. So a newer message that was mailed to the whole company and needs no response is put ahead of a message from your boss that needs a quick answer.

It’s a great system for spammers and marketers — they can interrupt us at any time, and get the same priority as an email from a colleague that needs a quick response. But it’s a terrible system for humans trying to manage their workflow.

Learning From Supply Chain

I worked at GE Aircraft Engines in Cincinnati, Ohio. They were a pioneer in Lean Manufacturing — with impressive efficiency and coordination across a worldwide network of suppliers.

What matters is making things arrive when they are needed in the process. Arriving too early is almost as bad as arriving too late. You start with the delivery date to the customer, and work backwards to make each step in the process lead up to that successful delivery.

It just makes sense. Workers and facilities have the materials they need at the time they need to do the work. Products move through the supply chain, so the carbon-fiber fan blades arrive for assembly just when they’re ready to be mated to the rest of the engine.

But we don’t do this for our knowledge workers. Emails and other asynch communications arrive as soon as the sender wants to get them off his desk. Imagine if you organized a manufacturing supply chain based on shipping goods at the most convenient time for the sender. Manufacturing plants would have to search through mountains of un-organized materials on the loading dock to keep the production line going, with plummeting productivity and wildly unpredictable delivery times to their customers.

This disaster is exactly the situation for office work. Employees have to juggle a huge and unrelated inventory of email work-in-process while new and often unimportant requests are constantly interrupting. We’d never tolerate this in manufacturing. Why do we tolerate it in knowledge work?

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Demand Flow for Asynch Communications

There aren’t any technical obstacles to designing asynchronous communications to use a demand-flow approach. It can be layered on top of older communication technologies like email or #Slack; or it could be the basis for a new kind of inbox. The advantages to workers could be enormous.

When you compose and email, there should be two new items you can optionally set: Respond-By Date, and Estimated Time To Respond. So I might say I need a response by tomorrow at 10am, and I think it will take you under 5 minutes to respond. Or perhaps it’s one of the many emails where no response is required — so I flag it as “No Response Needed.” We might experiment with other tags, such as an importance rating.

Now your inbox can be ordered by respond-by-date instead of arrival date. Instead of having to sort messages for urgency and importance, now the urgency is sorted for you. If there’s an importance rating (or even the current “important” flag in Outlook), it can sort by importance also.

Now let’s tackle the interruptions. Logistical powerhouses like Wal-Mart don’t just let trucks show up whenever they want. A delivery early or late results in a penalty.

Many productivity experts give the same advice for email — set aside certain times of the day to check email, so it can’t interrupt you all day. Since your inbox also runs your calendar (Outlook, Gmail, iCal), there should be a type of recurring calendar item called “Respond to Emails”.

If you set up these kinds of appointments, your inbox can adjust to not show you constant notifications, but only to bring itself up and get messages at these times. You might set up additional rules, so a few named people (your boss, a few colleagues) can break through and interrupt you at any time. Or, you might set a rule that if it’s from inside the company and a response is needed before the next email check period, it’s able to break through.

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Demand Flow User Example

Let’s see how some examples would work. I’ve set up three sessions on my calendar to respond to emails — 8am to 8:15, 11am to 11:30 and 4pm to 4:15. That’s one hour- about the amount of time a typical office worker spends on email during the day.

It’s 9:00am. A marketing email comes in from a supplier. It’s not marked with a “Reply-By Date” so it doesn’t alert or interrupt me. It’s sent to a folder of emails marked “No Need to Reply — External Sender.” An email from HR about a change to expense policy arrives and goes into a “No Need to Reply — Internal Sender” folder.

Now it’s 10:15am. An email arrives from a colleague with a question. He expects a response by the end of today, and estimates under 5 minutes to respond. This is sent to my inbox, where it’s placed in priority order based on the date the response is needed, not based on the arrival time. But I do not get an alert and my inbox is greyed out and not visible to me.

If I wanted to see my inbox and respond to email during a non-scheduled time, I have chosen some small-but-annoying obstacles to make that harder, such as having to enter my password or waiting 2 minutes before the email program loads. You might not choose any obstacles — it’s your choice.

When 11am arrives, my email program opens up and takes focus on the screen. It shows my inbox in priority order, based on the time the response is needed. It also shows the estimated time to respond, so I can speed through the easy ones before tackling the harder ones.

One of my emails has an estimate of several hours to complete — a customer needs a complete set of quarterly reports. I right-click the email and get a dialog box to put that on the calendar to complete tomorrow afternoon. It’s not “email” anymore, it’s a separate scheduled task.

I don’t get through everything by 11:30am, but that’s OK. I got through with everything that needed a response before the next email working period, and that’s all that matters. If I had gotten everything responded to in less than 30 minutes, that would be the time to review the No-Need-To-Respond emails.

My email program sends me a push alert to my phone at 3:30pm. Why? Since my 11:30 email session I’ve 5 gotten emails that need a response today — and each is estimated at 10+ minutes to respond. That’s more work than I have time to do in the 4pm slot. So the alert is letting me know that the work arriving is overflowing the time allotted. I can decide whether to switch into email earlier.

These examples show how a small change to email metadata can turn email from an all-day interruption into a well-managed part of the workday. With the right metadata and rules in place, my inbox turns into something like a virtual assistant — keeping my day on track and interrupting at on the right times when the interruption will help more than it hurts.

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The Need for Accountability

There’s a second piece to the puzzle — how to police the system and prevent abuse. Everyone will want to mark their emails as “Respond Immediately”. Customers and co-workers have an incentive to overstate the urgency of their requests and understate the time required.

Human assistants deal with the same problems every day. They develop an informal “reputation” score for each person and learn to put a priority weight on that person’s requests. Understanding who needs priority access (and who is a time-waster) is a key part of the assistant’s job.

Your inbox will never be as smart as a human assistant — but it has access to the data from everyone at the company, so it has a much better view of the data. Some people rant and rave over small problems, others minimize urgency even when a problem is getting severe. Instead of learning this from a few interactions between Node A and B of the network, if you can see how Node A interacts every other Node in the network, you get an accurate picture in much less time.

Accountability in Action

One approach is for email clients to collect a two-click rating from users at the time any message is responded to. The user would need to say how much the agree with the sender’s need-to-reply deadline and how much they agree with the time-to-reply estimate. The inbox client vendors would collect this information on a per-sender basis.

Employees would be able to see their own (anonymized) ratings, and company managers would be able to see the ratings of the people they manage, providing accountability and transparency within the organization. Company IT administrators would be able to see trends and data within the organization.

Many problematic emails will originate from outside the organization. What’s interesting is that the major email vendors could collect data about a sender from many organizations they send email to. If John Jones at Company A is getting flagged by 80% of the people he talks to at 25 different companies — he’s a problem. The group vote wins.

True SPAM emails are essentially from unknown senders, with a new email address each time. The system described here is not aimed at solving this issue. There are a variety of efforts underway, most of the aimed at nailing down a sender identity.

Conclusion

Email and other asynchronous communications deliver communications in an un-managed way that causes huge losses in productivity and quality for the people who receive them. This is equivalent to a supply chain in which materials are shipped at the sender’s convenience.

The recipient bears all the cost and work of being interrupted, determining the importance of an communication and whether it needs a response, determining when a response is needed, and managing the inventory of messages.

The same demand-flow and just-in-time approaches that have improved manufacturing and supply chain can be applied to office communications.

With a small amount of added metadata and functionality, inbox clients can require senders to specify whether a response is needed, the response deadline, and the amount of work estimated to respond. With this metadata in place, inbox clients can protect their users’ focus and attention, and help users manage their workflow in an efficient way.