In the past, Google innovated email usability with the Gmail platform, including functionality such as innovative spam detection, coversation threading, labels and filters.
Although other email applications showed similar features, enabling you to structure the contents of your inbox, Google made the use of filters and labels very efficient and usable.
At this point, it's clear that Google Wave has the potential to have a tremendous impact on how we communicate and consume information online. However, it's very unclear at this point whether we will be able to consume information more efficient, or whether we'll end up with a gigantic (over)flow of low-relevance bits of info.
If an electronics company will invent the best vacuum cleaner ever, it will only yield better results in the hands of someone who can grasp the concept of the device, and use it on a REGULAR basis. Maybe the handling of the electric chord will become handier, or you don't need to replace dustbags anymore.
The question is, is Google Wave a revolutionary vacuum cleaner, or can it be an automatic, laser system that automatically avoids that there is no more dust in your house ... ever.
Although I'm very enthusiastic about the platform and it's potential, I'm afraid we're looking at a revolutionary vacuum cleaner, instead of a silver-bullet no more dust solution. We will get great tools, but in the end we will need to be responsible power users, in order to fight your ever growing inbox.
WHY is your inbox always growing today ?
Preparing this article, I looked at my own inbox of 5000+ emails and wondered how it got to this point. Let's look at some obvious and less obvious causes:
Spam, advertising, newsletters reside in my inbox, although it's very unlikely that they contain information that I need, or want to read. During the day, I delete and archive these types of email all day long. For newsletters that I want to keep, I create a label, and a filter that avoids them ending up in the inbox.
Unread emails Funny enough, there are emails in my inbox, that I consider important, but they remain unread and gradually sink further down in the inbox. In many cases, this is because we can identify the information in the email, by the title. The reason why we (or at least I) leave it in the inbox, is because there is some kind of action related to the email, that needs to happen somewhere in the future. For example, you leave these because you want to reply to them later. Or when someone sends you a shopping list, you leave it unread until it's actually time to go to the shop.
Emails that we've answered. We leave interesting dialogues in our inbox. If we are the ones who answered last in the conversation, why do we leave it in the inbox ?
I believe, as an email users, we constantly ABUSE our inboxes because we have a deep FEAR TO FORGET.
And strangely enough, inboxes are very bad containers to truly tackle that fear. Your messages will sink down as new ones arrive, regardless of how important they are. If you don't remember by yourself to go back a few days in your inbox, or to look at "starred" emails, these messages will get forgotten. Unless the person who originally sent you the email, sends you a reminder. Today, huge amounts of time are being lost on writing reminders, and reading those reminders.
Aside from the fear to forget, some people just get too much professional email to read in a day. Even email that you actually should read. Although I believe this is very rare, this could be happening to you. In this case, it will often relate to overwork or too much projects. Address these issues to your boss, and get a grip a set of responsibilities and tasks that you can handle in an 8 hour working day.
So how do you tackle this ?
Assuming that this "FEAR to FORGET" is the core source, and making abstraction of the possibility that you would simply get too much emails in a day, here's what I thought of.
Embrace search: Search in email applications, and in Google Wave, is nowadays very good and powerful. In many cases you'll even be able to search the full-text of attached documents in your email. Look at search as a solution to solve your fear to lose information. Keep archiving those conversations or waves.
Extract a task from an email, and put it on your calendar If an email is important NOW, answer the email or execute the task you need to execute and archive it when you're done. When the information is important in a later point in time, make a reference to the email in your calendar, at a later point in time. When you come across an email that doesn't require action now, or in the future ... I'm pretty sure you can archive it, and search for one of the keywords if you want to retrieve it.
Be disciplined about it ! It will be your responsibility to constantly wonder: WHAT do I need to do with this info and WHEN do I need to do it. Make that decision before you archive the email. You'll see that your calendar will get fuller, and your inbox will remain clean.
If I can do it by myself, what will Wave do for me ?
Good news, you don't need to wait until the end of the year & Wave's release to have an empty inbox. However, Wave will make the whole process a lot easier.
In Depth Calendar Integration A wave will be much more flexible for in depth calendar integration, as opposed to an email message. If this gets implemented the right way, the difference between the email message, and the calendar item will become very vague. Let's say I am invited to a new wave, in which people are constantly updating it. It can be very disturbing to see it "pop up" every time again, if it's not relevant for me at the moment. At that point, I should be able to add a calendar//planning robot, that allows me to archive//hide the wave and it's updates, until the point in time that I specify in the future.
A wave client could come and ask me, for every wave that's in my inbox longer then ... (you can fill in this), at which point in time I want to do something, or whether I want to work on it immediately.
Priorities for communication from certain people and entities. Wave requires an invitation to take part in a wave. Robots, that you authorized can also channel information from other sources. In any case, you end up in a network of communication where you have some notion of the source where the information is coming from. I truly hope Wave clients will allow different views on incoming waves, depending on how we grouped our contacts. This is not rocket science: you can do this for yourself today using labels and filters, but this can be heavily optimized.
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