Work without E-mail: Is it Possible?
One of the most interesting things I heard at WordCamp Seattle this weekend was from Scott Berkun who works at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. He said that employees at Automattic, generally speaking, don’t communicate via e-mail.
I was intrigued. I am drowning in e-mail, and it’s becoming less and less useful because I simply cannot keep up with the volume I receive every day. It’s a shame because a valuable form of communication is being lost. (Yes, I’ve tried all the InboxZero and GTD stuff…if the volume is too much, even those don’t work.)
And, I am not alone. My friends at other companies the same complaint. Last night, a friend who works at Microsoft made two interesting points over dinner. First, that he assumed that other people didn’t read his e-mail, so anything that was important he had a conversation in person. And, second, that before about 20 years ago, nobody had e-mail and the world worked just fine. So, how is it that something which is seemingly good, like e-mail, seems to be so harmful? (I supposed one way we could tackle this e-mail problem is to only use e-mail in a case where 20 years ago you would have sent a letter or fax.)
Anyhow, I digress.
Automattic, according to Berkun, uses three primary means of communication.
- Skype, for instant messaging and voice/video calls.
- Group chat (technically, IRC) for open forums for conversation.
- Internal blogs. The company has a number of blogs that cut across two main dimensions—teams and subjects.
So, I guess the way things work is that if you want to broadcast something to the whole company at Automattic, then you write it on a blog. And, if you want to communicate with another person, then you do it in real-time via IM, chat or voice. (I would imagine that if it’s a private subject that can’t go on a blog, then that happens using one of the “in-person” means.) But, what you don’t do is sent off an e-mail that piles up into somebody’s inbox and just creates more work for them.
I asked Berkun how people kept up with all the blogs? Basically, he said they used various notification tools. Essentially, there are various ways to subscribe to a blog, such as RSS or even IM. (Yes, you can have a WordPress blog as your “buddy” in IM! Every time someone posts, a link is pushed to a message and sent to you.) Berkun said there are even ways that the subscriptions can filter for words, so that any post which has his name in it…he gets a text message alerting him to it.
All of this is really fascinating and intriguing to me. Can anybody from Automattic shed some light on how this works? Is it true? Can you teach us how it’s done?
Does anybody else work like this? If so, how do you make it work? I’m really interested in solving the e-mail problem, and would love your help.
This is a great topic Scott.
I was at a meeting in SF with my co-founder at 1000 Markets and heard Automattic talk about this same stuff. We returned home from that meeting and immediately set up a company-wide group chat in Skype (we had a distributed organization). That group chat was active every day for more than a year. We used it for company announcements, site-release notes (short), problem solving, discussions and socializing. It was great.
We worried it might be distracting, but I think that teams adjust and create their own behavioral norms to make this stuff work.
Most people would return from being gone (mornings, weekends, meetings) and just scroll through to see what they missed, so generally everyone was up to date. We adopted strategies for getting people’s attention by specific phrases. For me, “0john” was how you got my attention, and I had a notification set up in Skype to alert me when that text was used. (All other notifications for that chat were turned off.)
I thought this might work out well, but it really exceeded my expectations dramatically, improved the team social dynamic, kept people informed and kept our email down. I think it’s definitely worth a try.
John Wedgwood
18 Apr 11 at 11:22 am
We’ve dealt with this for years with a dispersed network of bloggers who are all trying to share best practices, and get social media sharing help from their peers, and we’ve always tried to avoid email for this purpose if possible, both for inbox clutter reasons, and for making sure useful info isn’t buried in entirely private conversations.
2007: Skype (realtime), Campfire (group meetings, persistent record), internal phpBB forum (asynchronous storage of best practices/docs)
2011: Skype (realtime direct chat/voice/video), internal BuddyPress community for everything else (“private” groups by topic, chat/IRC plugin for group chats–P2 serves many of the same functions)
Funny how not much has changed in 5 years about the challenges of organizing dispersed effort.
Interested to see what feedback you get, and conclusions you come up with.
David Anderson
18 Apr 11 at 12:51 pm
@0john At Cheezburger, we use a Campfire chatroom in the same way. Originally, we used IRC, but prefer the ease of Campfire.
scottporad
18 Apr 11 at 1:45 pm
@David What plugins do you use to get the notifications out of P2 and into chat/IRC?
scottporad
18 Apr 11 at 1:46 pm
At my first two startups,interaction centered around IRC channels. This replaced the vast majority or email and in-person interaction, including meetings. Conversations were persistent so everyone could review them on their own time. The medium encouraged even the smallest/”stupidest” query, promoting participation and increasing transparency. This was far superior to having all 20+ of us work in a single room: there were no uncontrollable interruptions and no talking over one another.
That was my office (and conference room) for more than ten years. After leaving my last company, I spent a couple years at “regular” firms. One used IRC, but not everyone cared for it and, importantly, it didn’t have management buy-in. There was a huge difference in interaction level/quality and in total organization productivity that I attribute directly to traditional communication styles. Especially face-to-face meetings. Damn, those things suck.
Encouraging use among all stakeholders, especially management, is important. IRC was great for us Unix curmudgeons chained to character-cell terminals. For my current startup, we’ve switched from IRC to Hipchat to accommodate peripatetic workers.
For one company that’s pushing the envelope on this stuff: http://www.lovemachineinc.com/ specifically via http://dev.sendlove.us/journal/
Also, one addition that is hugely helpful: interleaving system status announcements into the discussion stream. Hourly hit counts, downage alerts, repo commits, integration failures — anything that would normally be sent to your email inbox by a robot.
Doug Luce
18 Apr 11 at 3:47 pm
It’s all true! Scott Berkun wouldn’t lie
Some stats:
* Since I started at Automattic in 2006, I have received about 8000 emails from other Automatticians.
* About 90% of these emails had one or more of the recipients outside Automattic (we have since mostly moved this type of communication to blogs as well)
* About 8% of these emails were from a non-human (some sort of automated notification coming from an @automattic.com address)
* That leaves less than 3 emails per month where the only participants were folks inside Automattic. Pretty good!
* Since we started using Prologue/P2 for communication sometime in 2008, I have made over 3,000 posts and 10,000 comments on our internal Automattic blogs.
Skype is pretty good for one-on-one and small groups, but since it is peer-to-peer sometimes the send/receive queues are a little weird and the logs are somewhat siloed and difficult to search programmatically, especially in new versions. I am also not a big fan of push/interrupt-based communication, especially in group chats where not all of the content may directly apply to me.
We use IRC a lot. I highly recommend something like ZNC which is an IRC proxy. ZNC connects to your IRC server and then you connect to ZNC. This allows me to do things like view the chat scroll back for things that happened while my client was disconnected. IRC clients are very configurable to “ping” you in different ways when your name or other keywords you specify are mentioned. We also log all IRC conversations so it is easily searchable later (example can be found at https://irclogs.wordpress.org/). IRC networks are also designed to be very fault tolerant – we have multiple IRC servers running in multiple data centers, so even during large outages part of our IRC network is usually up and running.
Almost all of our internal blogs use the P2 theme – http://p2theme.com/ The Jabber integration is a little complicated, but if you use WordPress.com you get that for free.
To keep up with all of this activity I use a combination of:
* Blog subscriptions – http://en.support.wordpress.com/blog-subscriptions/
* Comment subscriptions – http://en.support.wordpress.com/comment-subscriptions/
* Jabber subscriptions – http://im.wordpress.com/
* IRC notifications (simple bot to parse RSS feeds and put them into IRC).
Depending on my perceived priority of the content subscribed to, I get notified via one of the above methods. All in all, it is a lot of content to ingest, but works well and I definitely couldn’t do it using just email
Barry
19 Apr 11 at 2:50 pm
@Barry, thank you so much for the comment. If you wouldn’t mind, could you elaborate on how you have all these notifications wired up? Do all the notifications go into your e-mail? IM? RSS?
scottporad
19 Apr 11 at 3:03 pm
All 3, as I sort of mentioned in the last part of my previous comment:
* “High” priority goes to email (mostly because it is persistent and annoying so I won’t misplace the notification later).
* “Medium” priority goes to Jabber/IM
* “Low” priority goes to IRC via RSS.
I have the priorities in quotes because they are assigned by me and so rather arbitrary. Everyone deals with notifications a little differently though.
Barry
19 Apr 11 at 3:14 pm
One note is that different people, and different teams, use the irc/skype/blog combo differently. I know some people who have an elaborate system of notifications, and others who mostly use the simple search/list tools we have. In talking to co-workers at Automattic it’s clear we each use different strategies to manage information, and the tools make it easy to support that.
Scott Berkun
19 Apr 11 at 9:39 pm
@ScottBerkun Thanks for the comment. Would you mind comparing and contrasting how Barry uses notifications and e-mail versus how you use them?
scottporad
20 Apr 11 at 7:30 am
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