Is the Shared Inbox an Answer to Email Woes? (Part 1 of 2)

26 Jan 2021

The common theme in the race to fix email involves methods of triage. Some efforts are bound to be much more satisfying than others.

The big problem with email is the dread it induces in most of us. Our inboxes are constantly inundated. And when this is placed into its context - demanding jobs, back-to-back meetings, evening calls with remote offices - the constant arrival of emails is more than a distraction. It makes work seem truly sisyphean.

One popular way of addressing this issue is with so-called zero inbox methodologies. These approaches encourage users to manage their email life with prioritization techniques and personal disciplines involving austerity. From the outside, it could be considered a little bit monastic. But these methodologies point to a single valuable practice: triage. You are asked to triage your inbox and handle messages in a particular way, giving time to important things and ignoring what you can. There’s a host of features in every email client (folders, tags, user-defined rules) to help automate this task. Sure, it makes sense for users to know how to use these features as part of an ongoing practice.

But why should anyone be forced to intercede and perform these actions? Why should they have to turn managing an inbox into a weird lifestyle? The barrage of incoming messages is not the user’s fault. S/he shouldn’t have to read about a methodology, which, if not a religious commitment, is akin to reading a user manual (bad!). These kinds of actions should be regarded as a short-term workaround and not a long-term fix.

This leads us to some interesting services that have come about in the last few years. Google Priority Inbox and Outlook Focused Inbox introduce upstream filtering to highlight messages most important to the user. A slightly different example is Front. There are many services like this one. Essentially, what they do is draw the burden of triage away from the individual by consolidating messages into a common inbox. Before email has to be acted on by the individual end-user, a set of common rules can be administered, such as the determination of which end user in a group needs to take action and according to what SLAs.

In part 2, I’ll get into this subject in greater detail with some thoughts on whether shared email can ‘fix email’.