Tuesday, November 22, 2005

email: the scourge of office productivity

And you tought that eMail was revolutionary. During the early heydays of internet, it is. At least it gives an almost-instant way of communicating second only to IRC channels. But now, you still have IRC (which might be banned in corporate network) and IMs. In sending an email, the latency between the sending and receiving actions tend to be longer than expected if the recipient does not expect to receive a message or the message gets queued in the server. Also, as per my experience, emails sent to me which were written on different timezones tend to position themselves on a different part on my inbox, at least, on Thunderbird. With this, I'd definitely miss some message, unless, except when what I'll do the whole day is to scan my inbox and determine the new arrivals in time-sorted manner. The bottomline is that email is not real time. People who uses email in their work tend to slack. Pardon me but that's what it is. When communicating in a software development world, I'd prefer logged IM messages. This is more real time.

And the thing that endears me to IMs compared to email:

.... you don't get spam.

cheers.

ok. let me now post this through email ;)

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