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Working with e-mail

By Linda May

Electronic mail is fast becoming part of Penn's administrative and scholarly culture. E-mail uses networks to send messages quickly and easily from one desktop computer to another. Telephone tag can be reduced, projects coordinated, ideas and manuscripts exchanged, and social contacts nourished.

E-mail is a new enough medium that people are still conscious of how they use it. A collection of Penn faculty and administrators speak here of their personal strategies for using e-mail. The focus here is "work" messages - the messages colleagues send one another in the line of work - rather than the world of electronic special interest groups, although the distinction between the two is becoming increasingly blurred.

Staying on top of the mail

Triage. Jeff Seaman, Associate Vice Provost for Computing and head of the Computing Resource Center, has two strategies for keeping up with his mail - a "back-from-vacation-with-160-messages" strategy and an everyday strategy. If the mail is stacked up, "the first thing I do is triage. I go to the index and mark the 'must reads.' The garbage I delete without reading. I go in reverse chronological order." Seaman's everyday strategy, on the other hand, is "the electronic equivalent of 'handle each piece of paper only once.' I get on four times a day and read everything as it comes in. I deal with every message I can immediately. I answer, forward, or delete. If I can't do any of that, I leave it in my 'read' file, which is my 'undone' file."

There are people like Seaman who "delete the garbage" and answer what's left, and there's Tad Davis, Senior Programmer/Analyst with University Management Information Services, who answers every message - "until it gets to the end: 'Thank you.' 'Thank you for thanking me.' OK, I can stop now."

Delegate. Dr. Robert Koch, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, delegates in order to keep his mail from stacking up while he's gone. "If I'm not in, I ask my assistant to read it and get in touch with me if necessary. If she's not in, I ask a graduate student."

Filters. John Fought, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Language Analysis Center, considered writing a set of filters - a computer program to screen his mail according to the subject line and other criteria - "but people are so unreliable in the use of the subject line. Some are actually deceptive because they don't want to be filtered out." And besides, "the stuff I don't want to read is always changing so I would have to keep writing new filters. So I just delete instead."

In the background. Some people log on and off to deal with their mail, and others keep e-mail in the background so they can tell when a new message comes in. Jeanne Curtis, Director of Data Architecture in the office of Data Administration and Information Resource Planning, likes to "know as soon as things happen." Curtis describes herself as a "multiprocessor." "To be working on two or three things at once to me is perfect. That's why I need a big workspace - to spread out. And that's why I like e-mail to be there in a window. If I get bored, I want to be able to be distracted for a minute."

Getting people to answer

A message in itself. In getting people to read what you write, the subject line is a message in itself. "I look at who sent it and at the subject. It's important to put the purpose in the subject line," says Jeanne Curtis. "Sometimes I'm fooled-when the subject line goes on and on," and the topic appears at the end where it gets truncated.

Curtis sometimes uses eye-catchers. She titled a message to a colleague who lets her messages stack up, "I've hired you a male stripper." "She reads those quicker," Curtis reports.

Make it easy. Jeff Seaman tries to make it easy for people to answer. "Keep it very short; I rarely go over one screen. I'm very direct - I tell them what I want from them. People almost always answer if it's important enough, and if you give them something they can deal with. If they have to print it out and think about it, they may not answer. It helps if you give them alternatives." Seaman, in fact, sometimes specifies the action he'll take if he doesn't hear from the person. "I always make it in my favor-then they have to answer."

"I see a lot of people make the same mistake that you see in marketing - muddying it up with too many issues. If I have three things, I send three messages," says Seaman.

Tad Davis - who'll "do almost anything to avoid a meeting" - has a different strategy for making things easy. "I feel it's important to provide as much detail as possible. I try to anticipate what they would ask on the phone. That's one reason I communicate so well with Ron (Sanders - the University Registrar). I ask myself, 'What's the next question Ron is going to ask me?' 'What's the hole in this analysis?' "

Reminders. The reminder is a genre in itself. "If I don't get an answer, there's 'B-mail,' which is me knocking on their door," says James 'Beirne, Director of Career Development and Placement for Wharton's Graduate Division. For Michael Katz, Professor of History and Chairman of the History Department, "the question is how long to wait before calling them."

Jeanne Curtis sends summaries of original messages to at least one of her regular correspondents. "You need to send him the whole content, not just a reminder, since he won't go back and look for the original."

And for John Fought, "it's like the phone. When you leave another message on the tape, it adds weight and impact."

Dealing with a middleman. "Knowing that an assistant reads the boss's e-mail makes a big difference," says Jeanne Curtis. "How does the assistant decide what the boss sees and what he or she doesn't see? And in what order does the assistant lay out the e-mail on the boss's desk? If you were in good with the assistant, you could write a note, 'Please see that this gets into so-and-so's hands today.' "

Good news. James Beirne makes a point of using e-mail for good news as well as asking people to do things. "One or two (of my staff) don't necessarily look at e-mail. That's when I put good news and things they want to know on it. That gets them through it."

Train your audience. Beirne is also leading an effort to get his new boss to use e-mail. "He's very verbal. He likes communication primarily verbally." Beirne and his colleagues are trying to shape the boss's behavior by "giving him most of the information he needs on e-mail. And not returning his phone calls-that's a fine line, of course. I walk over to his office and say, 'You wanted a response? It's in e-mail.' "

Presumption of urgency. Others question the presumption of urgency that colors e-mail. "It's a false assumption that because you can transmit instantly, you should respond instantly," says Randall Couch, Senior Technical Writer for Data Communications and Computing Services. "That takes control of my time out of my hands. E-mail is taking its place with FAX and the telephone - social mores say you can't ignore a ringing phone."

Playing with the distribution list

The underlying message. An e-mail feature available for manipulation is the list of recipients. Whose name is on or off the list is the underlying message of many messages. For systems that distinguish primary recipients from people who receive "carbon copies," who ends up on which list is likewise part of the message. In some cases, it's the name of the list itself that's used to make a point. There's a list called "Interesting_People_at_CIS," for example.

Softening the written word

Matching medium and message

Tad Davis would disagree. "I have a reputation for writing very long messages. Sometimes you can see my transition point. I start out writing a short message, suddenly hit my stride and go on for pages."

Cultural criteria. The most important criteria may be cultural. The casual, off-handed nature of e-mail colors the activities transacted in the new medium. Part of what's going on at Penn and elsewhere is the working out of what's culturally appropriate in the new medium and what's not appropriate. "Grad students I have taught have e-mailed me and asked me to write them a letter of recommendation," says Jerry Jacobs, Associate Professor of Sociology and chair of the graduate program, for example. "I figure they should have called me."

Your experience invited

Sidebar 1: Further reading

Shapiro, Norman, et al. (1985). Towards an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation (publication R- 3283-NSF/RC).

Sproull, Lee and Sara Kiesler. (1991). Connections: new ways of working in the networked organization. Cambridge: MIT Press. (A social psychology perspective.)

Updegrove, Daniel, John A. Muffo, and John A. Dunn Jr. (1990). "Electronic Mail and Networks: New Tools for University Administrators." CAUSE/EFFECT 13(1): 41-48. (A good how-to-get-started article. Available in PennInfo under submenu "PennNet" of the "Computing" menu.)

Winograd, Terry. (1988). "Where the action is." Byte. December: 256a- 58. (A social interactional perspective.)

Sidebar 2: E-mail at Penn

E-mail systems vary across the University - from mainframe-based packages, such as PROFS, and minicomputer-based systems, such as ALL-IN- 1, to UNIX workstation, PC, or Mac LAN-based systems. Some LAN-based systems restrict communication to a single department, but most systems can communicate campus-wide over PennNet, and worldwide via PennNet's connections to the Internet and BITNET. In such a diverse environment, it's hard to quantify e-mail use at Penn, but a few statistics give at least a flavor. Penn's faculty/staff online e-mail directory "Whois" has 2,386 entries. Of the standing faculty who responded to the 1990 Information Access Survey, 30 percent reported using e-mail outside Penn and 20 percent reported using e-mail within Penn. Of those who use e-mail, 33 percent called it "effective" and another 43 percent called it "very effective." For more information on using e-mail in your department, contact the information technology support organization in your school, or contact George McKenna, Director of Network Operations, Data Communications and Computing Services, 898-8184 or george@dccs.

Sidebar 3: e-mail task torce

Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing Peter C. Patton has formed a task force to investigate the feasibility and benefits of providing e-mail for all Penn students. (Currently e-mail is available to all students in Annenberg, Engineering, and Medicine; to all graduate and professional students in Wharton; and to any SAS graduate and Wharton undergraduate student who requests it.) The task force includes representatives from schools, libraries, University Life, and Information Systems and Computing. For information, contact task-force chair Daniel Updegrove, Assistant Vice Provost for Data Administration and Information Resource Planning (898-2171 or updegrove@a1.relay).