“Can you increase my email account size limit?” At about every job I ever had, I have needed to make this request of the IT administrator, usually sooner rather than later. The 1 or 2 GB limit is easily breached by a few dozen emails containing a creative package from a designer or a weeks worth of furious PDF back and forwarding. I always felt a bit sheepish about making these request, and the unsympathetic responses of IT administrators never helps. They are generally solicitous with helpful suggestions along the lines of deleting old mail, using folders, auto archiving... All great ideas outside of the fact that I use my collected emails as a kind of universal business database. They constitute my task manager, CRM system, project management system, and time tracker. Perhaps most importantly, they act as a notary/recorder that tracks and confirms delivery of important communications and keeps an exact copy of what was sent to whom and when. The entire database has to be available for search, usually with several years’ worth of data, for this to work. Clearly this is not what my Outlook application is designed to do. I’ve been using it in a profoundly wrong way for a very long time. Feeling like a Luddite. What’s more aggravating is that my co-workers never seem to run into this problem. My assessment there is that they aren’t dealing with the file sizes associated with creative work.
Recently I have been talking to a lot of service professionals: architects, producers, management consultants and so on. I’ve asked each of them about how they use their email systems and have been surprised to find that many of them are doing what I do and grappling with what I grapple with on a daily basis. Most daydream about efficiencies gained by filing their communications into folders, or using the task and calendar functions more consistently. Most also need some kind of project management tool and an accounting tool to help organize their communications.
Gmail has taken away some of the pain with its faster and more comprehensive search and larger inbox size limits. With 25GB, I don’t have to worry about headroom but this reprieve has given me the bandwidth to take a fresh look at how I use email and think of ways to improve the process. What if the email, chat, SMS or Skype communication was the atom in project management and not the task? In every project, each task is concluded with a communication of some kind. A piece of code is checked into the repository, and you notify the collaborators. A comp of the brochure is finalized and the file is sent by email to the client. If every significant task ends with a communication, the right time to categorizes and file that communication is at that mini milestone rather than later in a housekeeping session. I can imagine an email interface where, when I hit the send button on an email, the application looks at the content, recipient and attachment and prompts me to do all the housekeeping tasks that I rely on to organize my projects. If the name of the file attached matched a client or job name in QuickBooks or Basecamp, the application would ask whether I wanted to update the time tracking or milestone progress on those records. Rather than having to rely on unlikely diligence around my work habits to consistently initiate communications within a project management application or fill out time tracking and billing information after the fact, this dreamy yet hypothetical application would be able to intelligently associate the communications with the appropriate accounts and prompt me for confirmation and amendment.
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