You know, it’s a curiosity to me as to why folks are so afraid of email. Whether you’re in the same office or you’re dealing with an outsourced group in india, folks seem to have this great fear over sending mail. In fact most of them show an even greater tendency not to respond to email they’ve received, but rather come directly to you to discuss the question at hand.

It’s not that I’m anti social. It’s not that I don’t like seeing your face (well, not true in all cases). But there’s an extremely important reason why I chose to send you email:

I want to have a record of your response

Yes, email does have the tendency to encourage trolling. Yes, people who would otherwise be polite to you in person can turn all snarky in email. But it also has this great advantage to help clarify what’s been discussed.

Writing something down forces you to think through what you’re saying (or so I hope) and gives you an opportunity to self edit before you answer. It also helps that when I’m tasked with about 10 different things and you ask me to do something, I can refer back to the email and not have to bug you when forget exactly what you’ve asked for.

Any Questions?

Ok, MR CEO. I have a message for you. It’s a simple one and I want to you listen very carefully to what I have to say. Ready? Here it goes:

When it’s obvious that I’m working heads down on a problem, please don’t walk up and tell me a joke.

Now I realize you’re a little uncertain about the gig you’ve just taken. Only being here a month and all, I can understand how concerned you might be. After the absolute fucking mess you’ve found you’re a little concerned about what’s going in engineering. Because of that fact, I can understand that you want to check in with all aspects of the organization to make sure people are getting shit done. But please don’t come up to me and do the check in “thing” by telling a joke, starting a conversation about my pint glass or asking me if some general area of work is all good.

When you do that, you disrupt the mind from the problem I’ve got it wrapped around. What that means is that I lose time working on the problem, become less productive and end up spending the next arbitrary amount of time getting my mind back to the problem. That is, after I write this fucking blog post.

I understand you want to act like the cool hip CEO so you can get the inside information. You want everyone to believe that you’re one of the guys so that they will talk to you as such. But I’ve got a little fact to share with you:

You’re not.

Now please let me get back to doing my job and please go do yours.