Telepocalypse

OPINION://Message in a bottle

It was amusing to see Vodafone's advert in the airport the other day. There they are, blasting out how they now offer Blackberry service on their network. Busy as usual taking credit for other people's inventions and acting as gatekeeper. Who can blame them?

Except that Vodafone have done next to nothing to make this happen beyond supply connectivity. Not that running a vast cellular network is a trivial thing -- it's just the pretense that Vodafone are doing you a favour by permitting Blackberry devices onto their sacred network that riles.

I remember the many arguments inside Sprint's Business Solutions division as to whom we should partner with to offer enterprise email service. We visited Seven out in the Valley, and RIM came to talk (down) to us. IBM gave their pitch many times over. But all these people -- and the real customers -- really wanted from us was a bit pipe and a sales force who could sell and provision the devices to go on it.

So Vodafone and Sprint haven't done anything to improve the state of the art in messaging. But the funny thing is, despite all the plaudits and fans, neither has RIM. Or Microsoft. Or anyone else for that matter.

The problem is that there is a narrow focus on "messaging" rather than productivity -- just like VoIP results in a narrow focus on "calling" rather than successful conversations and relationships.

I believe that even humble email can be transformed in how it is used and managed.

I recently discovered the 43 Folders blog, which is dedicated to personal productivity and self-improvement. It in turn is inspired by the book Getting Things Done, which I'm too mean to buy (and too lazy to read), but have enjoyed reading this summary.

In a nutshell, it's a system for turning your life goals into manageable itty bitty chunks that you have some hope of tackling on a dreary Monday morning in the office when you could easily be goofed off reading telecom blogs.

The "43 folders" moniker comes from the Getting Things Done (GTD) system itself. Part of the system involves consciously deferring things into the next 31 days, or 12 months (and 31+12=?). Move things out of your inbox -- where they cause you stress and decision fright -- into your system. Relieve your short-term memory of unfinished items. Give yourself a daily dopamine shot by clearing your to do list.

I've begun to re-organise my email system along these lines. Since I run my own email server, I've got a lot of control. As you can see to the left, I've created appropriately named folders in my inbox. Actions I choose to actively defer are slotted away into the appropriate folder. Today is Sunday, so if I don't think it deserves my attention again before Thursday, I put it into the "+Day.04" folder.

Every night I have a script that runs and moves things down. Stuff in "+Day.01" moves back into my Inbox. Stuff in the following days moves down one folder. Stuff in my "+Month.xx" folders that has appropriately aged also cascades on down.

I also maintain a ToDo folder. (In case you haven't worked it out, the "" symbol simply forces these all to the top when sorted alphabetically.) In this folder I can expect to see the half dozen or so things I expect to do today. By keeping this separate from my inbox, I'm not forced to treat incoming mail as "to do" items. If necessary I can consolidate a whole bunch into one "to do" message, and file them away.

Having a separate ToDo folder also forces me to separately consider emails that re-emerge into my inbox after a period in purdah. These appear as read items, whereas truly new emails are, naturally, unread. Old "to do" items don't just silently slip back into my to do list.

Every time I think of a new "to do" item in my life, I send myself an email, and file it an appropriate time into the future. Of course, I also maintain a traditional calendar for events that are truly fixed in time.

Now, I would hardly claim to be the world's most effective action-oriented person. The three minute morning blog and email fix has been known to take three hours and more. But this system definitely helps a serial procrastinator such as myself to make a start on even the most unpleasant jobs.

It isn't perfect. For example, the GTD system suggests the use of project folders to group to do items. The limits of my email client just don't make that very practical. It's too hard to manage. I can't, for example, take a virtual view of all my current to do/next step items across multiple projects.

There is an honourable exception to the statis of email technology. IBM's research labs have been busy creating new means of visualising email. Yes, we want better ways of viewing large data sets. Yes, we want to seeing the connections between messages and senders. But still they're creating innovative solutions to the wrong problem. People need to be more productive.

That means respecting their finite cognitive ability, as well as understanding their complicated social relationships. If your boss sends you an email with a sentence ending in a question mark, perhaps your PDA needs to make this swell in importance?

(Hmm - the Personal Digital Assistant only ever delivered on 2 of those 3 words. Assistance was sadly lacking. If Palm make the handheld computer, I'm looking forward to a company called Brain making the mindfelt computer.)

This could spell good news for a few players. If they cracked it, Microsoft and IBM would be extremely well placed. They can add proprietary extensions to their dominant messaging server products and email clients to support the advanced slicing, dicing and workflow that true productivity demands. Your old fashioned open source IETF-standard compliant messaging engine won't be competing in the same market any more.

Device makers could also benefit. The beauty of the Blackberry is just the responsiveness of its actions, and the speed of the scroll wheel. But it's incomplete. How can you quickly categorise and file actions? How does it fit into your project workflow? Why doesn't it automatically highlight client messages versus internal chatter?

The UIs of some of RIM's competitors don't lend themselves well to "productive messaging" paradigm. Consider a Pocket PC with a touch-screen and a stylus. You're trying to associate each incoming message with an action and/or destination. But drag-and-drop just doesn't work that well.

I kind of imagine taking the touchpad technology from my laptop and putting a "touch strip" along the edges of the screen. Scroll and tap in multiple dimensions. Left and right scroll strips might even do different things.

So whilst there's plenty of room for improvement, don't hold your breath for any cellular carrier to help things out. Even IBM would turn blue in the face waiting.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 8:22 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/523

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Message in a bottle:

» Message in a bottle from Skype Journal
It was amusing to see Vodafone’s advert in the airport the other day. There they are, blasting out how they now offer Blackberry service on their network. Busy as usual taking credit for other people’s inventions and acting as gatekeeper. Who can b... [Read more]

Tracked on August 2, 2005 6:01 PM