What Should Be an Email vs. Instant Message

I’ve had this thought kicking around in my head now…probably since early in the Covid-19 pandemic. As so much of the world has transferred into a remote or hybrid work structure, how we communicate has changed dramatically as well. I come to this thought quite frequently, “what should be an email…and what should be a Teams message/Slack/other instant messaging service?”.

Many people appear to default to the instant message. This personally drives me insane. The little blinking “hey I want your attention” light, just bothers me in a way it shouldn’t. Which is why I’ve come up with some rules.

Rule 1. “Do I need an immediate answer?”

If one needs an immediate response, an instant message will likely serve better than an email. I would also say…picking up the phone and calling is probably best for an immediate answer. Each instant messaging service has a phone function…it’s worth using in a case of an immediate response. Winner: Phone. Second place: Instant message.

Rule 2. “Is the message longer than 3 sentences?”

If the message is longer than 3 sentences, it’s an email. If you’re sending it via chat, you’re sending an email via chat. Don’t do that.

Scott Hanselman has a great saying about having a finite number of keystrokes left. Use them wisely. Write blogs, documentation, etc. Just don’t leave information to exist somewhere and eventually die to the sands of time. Therefore he has a rule about limiting the length of sentences in an email. I’m 50/50 on something like that. Probably not best to work out an idea via email but it’s not uncommon for me to write documentation, and then copy/paste/send a link in an email for later use. Winner: Email

Rule 3. “Is this for later use?”

Similar to the point above, if you’re writing communication for later use it needs to be findable. Depending on the subject matter it’s probably worth documenting outside of one of these communication platforms. If not, it better be findable. Have you tried searching for something in a chat platform? In Teams, it works, but it’s not great. It’s much easier to find what you’re looking for in an email platform search. If you know the date, or date range something was sent that’ll help narrow down your search. Maybe you don’t remember the document name but you remember the subject line, so you can search by that. You have more tools. Winner: Email

Looking at my rules here…it seems like unless you need it right now (please call), email is the best communication tool for work. So why do so many people default to IMs? Perhaps you have an unruly inbox of over 500 emails. Perhaps big long discussions are happening and you’re somehow CC’d on a bunch of stuff you don’t need. You might be thinking “Andrew, my inbox is so stuffed at this point, using a chat app is basically a restart”. I hear that. However, I think instant message platforms have a hidden cost to them.

Anything that’s “easier” has a cost somewhere. Has this ever happened to you? You’re working on something, typing away, and then that silly little ping appears. “Hey quick question about X”, and perhaps you have a 3 or 4 message back and forth, then you go back to what you were doing…and you can barley recall your own name, let along get back on track. This is called context switching and it has a real cost to your productivity. One study showed it takes about 23 minutes to get locked in again after a distraction. If you had a full 8 hours, and got distracted by a teams message once per hour, you’d be losing almost 3 hours of productivity. Obviously most of us don’t work that way so these numbers are a loose example but I think it helps underscore the idea. What good is the chat app doing?!

True urgent matters deserve a phone call or meeting, and that’s a distraction you just can’t get out of. Happens to all of us. However for day to day work, the weird not-quite-asynchronous-but-also-not-synchronous nature of chat apps stinks for productivity, and I think we’d all do better to consider using other tools than the “easy” solution.