Please use this space to add your comments on the Email Charter, launched today. It's linked to the main Charter site so your comments will be seen by many people. Do you share a sense of rising email stress? Does the Charter make sense to you? If you have suggestions for edits or changes, please make them -- we may be able to use them in a future update.
One thing's clear. The Charter has struck a chord. 50,000 people read the draft and hundreds offered comments, or tweets. We incorporated as much feedback as we could in the final version. Thank you to the many contributors. The main changes were:
- to shorten it to just 10 rules
- to keep it focused on the core idea of protecting the time of email recipients
One area of controversy was around acronyms. Some people hate them. In general we agree, but we did decide, based on other responses, that two acronyms were worth wide adoption because of their ability to save recipient time (see rule 8).
Finally, just to be clear: I don't hate email. I love it. Numerous relationships and ideas have been nurtured because of it. It has brought laughter, excitement, productivity and insight. What I hate is being owned by email. Even if each individual message is a delight, their accumulation at some point becomes too much. Yet none of us wants to let people down. That's why this can't be solved by any of us acting alone. It needs a general recognition of the problem, and a gentle shift in our expectations of each other. Here's hoping the Charter can help do that.
If you agree, please spread the word!