Like others, I am trying to scale down my e-mail usage. See Tantek's post on e-mail being e-fail. I have put up this page to help you communicate with me easier.
See also How to Not Suck at Email
Communication Mediums I Like
- IRC is one of my favourite mediums of communication. It's fun, allows people to afk and has a very good signal:noise ratio. It also de-bullshits people - you are no longer the CEO/Head Honcho/Vice-Chancellor/Prime Minister - you are just a string of characters and whatever reputation has built up around those. I am tommorris on irc.freenode.net and hang out on channels I am interested in - #microformats, #swig, #geekdinner, #git, #github, #foaf etc. I also have channels for specific events - if I blog or tweet about an IRC channel, you can bet I'm on there.
- IM is good too. My preferred network is Jabber/XMPP (over GTalk), although I also have accounts on AIM, Yahoo! MSN, Facebook and LiveJournal.
Communication Mediums I Don't Like
- E-mail is a huge time suck, and it's a viral time suck. Because it encourages other bad practices, it spreads evil far and wide.
- Facebook and MySpace. I'm only on them because it's socially expected. I don't actually like them.
- Telephone and voicemail. I'm perhaps one of the few people on the planet to have a voicemail warning rather than a greeting. That's because it costs me money to get voicemail, and I don't get it very quickly. I would much prefer almost any other mechanism than phone. It's really intrusive. If someone phones me, I have to drop whatever I'm doing and answer it. And people seem to have extremely short attention spans. If I don't answer my phone in two rings, you ring off, and then I'm forced to play telephone tag with you. Be patient.
How to communicate efficiently
- Speak to me like a human being, not like a tosser.
- Don't waste my time - get to the point quickly.
- Don't equivocate, use logical fallacies, lie or attempt to befuddle me with marketese.
- DO put things on the Internet, and give me a URI. Giving something a URI makes it useful in a way that putting it in an e-mail does not.
- Tell me what I need to do. It should take me less than about five seconds to figure out what I actually have to do, otherwise it goes to the bottom of the queue.
- Don't top post.
- Don't send me large attachments.
- Don't send me Microsoft Office files.
- Don't send me files in complex formats when simple ones exist. ASCII, HTML, simple XML formats and so on are preferred over PDF and large graphics.
- Don't expect immediate responses. I do other things than just respond to your e-mails.
Suggested practices
- On conference announcements, put them up on the Web and then send a very abbreviated version to the mailing list. That way, you aren't cluttering up my inbox - and I can forward them on to other people without using e-mail.