There is a line buried at the bottom of a lot of emails sent from phones:
Get Outlook for iOS
For years, I have mostly ignored it. This week it felt a little more meaningful.
We have Teams channels, Teams chats, Loops, OneNotes, Azure DevOps, SharePoint sites, shared documents, trackers, dashboards, automated reports, internal sites, and probably three other places where someone confidently told you, “this is where we’re going to keep everything going forward.”
Yet when something important needs attention, there is still a pretty good chance it ends up in email.
That is not necessarily because email is the best tool. It is often because email is the common denominator. Everyone has it, everyone checks it, and when something needs to cross teams, organizational boundaries, tools, and working rhythms, email has an uncanny ability to become the place where everything converges.
This week I was helping coordinate preparation for a set of upcoming executive customer engagements. We had a central tracker, a recurring review, identified owners, briefing materials, milestones, and a weekly note calling out gaps and actions. The process itself was fairly straightforward.
Then people started responding.
One person had an update on one customer. Someone else had details on another. Another team had incident context. Someone else had briefing materials. People replied, forwarded, added recipients, removed recipients, responded to older branches, and created new forks from what everyone thought was the same conversation.
Almost every individual response made sense on its own. Taken together, the thread became difficult to follow.
Several customers were being discussed under effectively the same subject line, and some important updates only existed several replies deep in one branch. Other people were responding to different versions of the same original message. Eventually, someone trying to understand the status of one engagement was sorting through updates about several others.
The feedback was fair: even someone who is very good at managing email cannot easily manage a large collection of unrelated updates that all look like the same conversation.
The first adjustment was also very simple: put the customer name in the subject line.
No new system, additional workflow, or redesign of the process. Just enough structure to let Outlook separate one conversation from another.
It was a useful reminder that communication problems are not always tooling problems. In fact, sometimes adding another tool just gives the information another place to hide.
When information is difficult to find, our instinct is often to create a new Teams channel, start a Loop, add a OneNote, build something in ADO, stand up a SharePoint site, create another tracker, automate another notification, or introduce another layer of technology. Each of those can be exactly the right answer for a particular problem, but collectively they also create an environment where the first question becomes, “Where does this live?”
Basic information architecture still matters. Clear naming matters. Ownership matters. Consistent taxonomy matters. A useful subject line matters. Knowing where the authoritative version of something lives matters.
It also matters how people are actually going to consume the information. We can build a thoughtful operating model across all of those tools, but an executive between meetings may still be looking at a phone trying to understand what is happening and what they need to do next. In that situation, the quality of the experience may come down to whether the email subject is useful, the summary provides enough context, the owner is obvious, and there is a link back to wherever the source of truth happens to live.
There is a lot of energy going into reinventing how work gets done, and much of it is worthwhile. At the same time, some very old lessons continue to hold up surprisingly well: make the message easy to identify, keep related conversations together, make ownership clear, and point people back to the source of truth.
Because after the Teams channels, Loops, OneNotes, ADO work items, SharePoint sites, dashboards, and other Teams chats, somehow we all end up back in the same place.
Get Outlook for iOS.
Email always wins.
Down the rabbit hole
- Why is OOF an OOF and not an OOO? — an old Exchange Team Blog post tracing Microsoft’s enduring “OOF” shorthand back to the Xenix mail system and its Out of Facility feature. It also includes some bonus Microsoft email archaeology around “little r” and “big R.”
- The secret history of the Out of Office message — Microsoft’s later look at the history, including an archivist’s useful distinction between the documented OOF feature name and the longstanding “Out of Facility” company lore.
- The Cost of Email Use in the Workplace: Lower Productivity and Higher Stress — Microsoft Research on the relationship between email use, focus, perceived productivity, and stress.
- Will AI Fix Work? — Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index on “digital debt,” including the finding that the average employee in its dataset spent 57% of their time communicating in meetings, email, and chat versus 43% creating in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
