Maybe Email Ain’t So Bad

I have been on a real anti-email kick lately.

I’ve been talking smack about how much email sucks. About how email doesn’t really fit into the modern communications model. And about how absolutely terrible email is for doing any sort of collaborative work (wikis and waves are much better in that regard).

My hate-on for email has got to the point where I basically only check my work email. Work email is pretty much unavoidable, especially since I work for a distance organization.

Personal email, though, is something I rarely check. Rather, I check it fairly often, but I don’t bother to actually read most of what shows up in my inbox.

But, lately, email has proved to be a boon.

Email has allowed me to get advice from friends, it has allowed me to plan parties and events (though, Facebook does a better job of this if everyone involved is on it), and it’s allowed me to chat about football with a minister. These are all small things, and all of them could have happened without email, but email expedited the process of each.

So maybe email isn’t so bad. We’ve just got to remember what it does well, and try to avoid using it for what it does poorly.

UPDATE: You’ll notice that “and waves” have been struck through. This is because, shortly after writing this post, I got word that Google will no longer be developing Wave and will ultimately kill the site by the end of the year. It’s too bad, because I was really starting to like the tool.