E-mail

 

E-mail is unavoidably central to everyday life. If used wisely, it is a godsend.  However, there are good and bad ways to use it, and if one isn’t careful it can easily end up consuming vast amounts of time to no good effect.  It is surprising how many people have not worked out a modus vivendi with this tool, and have consequently let it dominate their lives.  That is why I have jotted down these brief notes.  My hope is that they will at least reduce the chance that emailers encountering my email style will ‘consider it rude,’ as Clarice Starling put it.

 

First and foremost, please remember that I (like many people) get far more emails than I could possibly reply to with anything more than basic courtesy.  The average runs at maybe 100 per day during the teaching quarter.  Please excuse me if I come across as clipped or curt.

 

It would be possible to spend all day online dealing with email and still not achieve the elusive perfect quality of communication that one would wish for.  So I ration my time, spending two hours per day (maximum) on email.  Generally this means one hour in the morning and one in the evening.  I may be online at other times, but I may not be.  Please don’t be offended if you don’t get an instant reply.  There may also be times when I am offline, especially while travelling.

 

Most emails that do not require extended responses will get answers in 24 hours.  If you need a quicker reply, please use the telephone.  A slower reply is often better: after all, history is supposed to be a reflective enterprise, and reflection takes a little time.

 

If I don’t reply in a couple of days, feel free to re-send your message.  What has probably happened is that the original scrolled up the screen as more emails arrived, and I forgot that it existed.  That’s reprehensible, I know, but it happens to all of us occasionally.

 

I try not to do long, discursive emails.  I think of an email as halfway between a telegram and a letter – not quite as blunt as the former, but also not as long or circuitous as the latter.  I know that others see the medium differently, but this is how I have found it to work best.  The optimum length is 5 sentences or less.

 

If a message is complex, it’s better to speak in person than to go back and forth several times over email.  The scope for misunderstanding on email is very high.  Even if the literal meaning of words is clear, “tone of voice” can easily be misconstrued, sometimes to serious and lasting effect.  Phone conversations generally don’t suffer from this problem nearly as much.  So, again, use the telephone.  If you need a record of something we agreed to on the phone, it’s a good idea to send an email then, saying what it was.

 

I hope this sounds reasonable.  By all means let me know if you’ve anything to suggest.… Email would be a good way to do that.

 

 

 

 Adrian Johns

 

773 702 2334 (office)

773 203 0809 (cell)

johns@uchicago.edu

Twitter: @ADSJohns