The email inbox is not meant to function as an information repository. Yet, we use it for exactly that: a place to keep track of information, from critical projects to simple to-dos.
Email is built to communicate, not catalogue. The unit of organization in an email inbox is the email itself. An email is one message, not one concept. An email may touch on multiple concepts, but usually, it takes multiple emails to flesh out a single concept.
This means that information is scattered across the inbox, in various emails and back-and-forth chains. To answer simple questions we have to dig through various emails. To keep track of projects we have to process information across the inbox.
All this takes effort: resources of working memory used up to parse, process and remember, as we rediscover and reintegrate information across emails, and build a structure in the mind – the current state of our world – so that we know where we are, and what we need to do next.
Worse, the structure is not saved anywhere; the next time we need this information, we’ll have to travel this road all over again.
It is to be expected that information is not available in useful form for the task at hand, at various stages of a project or work process. In an email inbox, the unit of organization is an email, not a concept. Email is built to communicate, not catalogue.
When we use the inbox as an information repository, we’ll have to reprocess and reintegrate information across emails and across time, over and over again.
Such is the cost of using a tool for something it wasn’t intended to do.
But there’s more to the story of email.
And that brings us to our ancient friend: text.
