Monthly Archives: May 2007

Email [curse | blessing], part two

The second installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively.

First off, reader and comics fan Craig pointed out this wonderful comic strip on the perils of email: Link. Thanks, Craig!

Next, here are some of my own current ruminations about email….

Spinning out of control (and how to stop)

Sometimes you have to use email to conduct business. The problem is that email discussions have this habit of spinning out of control. Sometimes people write things they later regret. Sometimes people stop reading carefully, and talk at one another instead of with one another.

Recently, I was participating in an ongoing email discussion. Another woman and I separately sent out perfectly innocent email messages that unwittingly stirred up strong emotions in someone else. That person sent out a very restrained reply, but suddenly it occurred to me that something was wrong.

Suddenly, it felt like things might spin out of control very quickly.

Fortunately two other people sent out nearly simultaneous email messages:– one person wrote, Let’s wait for our face-to-face meeting next week and discuss this there;– the other person wrote, This can wait until we have our next meeting. And our email conversation stopped immediately, while we wait for our next face-to-face meeting.

I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to stop and say, I’ll call you and we’ll talk on the phone — or, Let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. In addition, I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to listen when someone says, Hey I’ll call you on the phone — or, Hey let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. You always have to be willing to stop the email discussion at someone else’s request, and move to a more interactive mode of communication like the telephone or a face-to-face meeting.

The thing about email is that you often don’t know the emotional state of the person with whom you’re exchanging email. When someone else asks for a phone call or a face-to-face meeting, you have to trust that they really mean it. I’m thinking that when someone else asks for a phone call, the only appropriate email response is:– What are some times I can call you, and what’s the best phone number to reach you at? (or: What phone number are you at right now?) If someone asks for a face-to-face meeting, you can say:– When and where? That should keep things from spinning out of control.

Two other possibilities:– I believe that the better you know someone, the less likely it will be that an email discussion will spin out of control (which means that team-building for committees using email heavily is probably a good idea). I believe that having regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings helps a little to keep things from spinning out of control (because you know that you’re going to have to come face-to-face with those people).

But everything I’ve said here is up for debate. What are your experiences with email spinning out of control? What goes on when email discussions spin out of control? Once they start spinning, how to stop?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part three

Video haiku

Perhap my favorite site for Web videos at the moment is Video Haiku. Filmmaker/videographer Kevin O has the following rules for video haiku: the video should be two minutes or less, with five or fewer cuts, natural contemporaneous sound, and realtime playback. In other words, like haiku the videos are short, and there’s very little “rewriting.” And like written haiku, video haiku attempt to express a moment or place in a very compressed format.

What I like best about these video haiku is how you get a sense of the videographer’s body position during the film — as if the video almost manages to includes a muscle sense, or proprioception, as well as the senses of seeing and hearing. There’s been an overlap between performance art and video art since at least the 1960’s, of course, but the smaller video cameras and image stabilization available today allow the videographer even more latitude in staying off the tripod. At their best, these video haiku allow the viewer to feel as if they inhabit the space that the videographer originally inhabited.

My sense is that much of today’s Web videos are heavily influenced by performance art. However, most Web videos simply serve to document the performance of the subject/videographer. Think about the classic video blogger tricks and techniques — holding the video camera at arm’s length and pointing it at yourself, extreme close-ups of facial expressions — these are really tricks which document the videographer’s body, which force the viewers to feel as if they are in close proximity to the videographer, but which don’t allow the viewers to be (as it were) inside the videographer’s space. Given this distinction, Kevin O’s video haiku are more like poems which allow us to experience the world from the poet’s frame of reference.

Mind you, I’m not thrilled by all the video haiku on Kevin O’s Web site. But that too is in keeping with the haiku tradition — haiku are written in the moment, and many of them are later discarded by the poet. In general, though, I’ve found this to be a Web site worth looking at.

Hey, Massachusetts religious liberals…

This just in from the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry:

Constitutional Convention Recessed Until June 14th

Yesterday legislators voted to reschedule the Constitutional Convention for Thursday, June 14th. We now have five more weeks to get the votes we need to stop the anti-gay amendment from going to the ballot box. Please contact your legislators and let them know that it is neither fair not just to write religious and civil discrimination into our Constitution.

If you’re a Massachusetts resident don’t forget to contact your legislators and tell them why you, as a religious person, don’t support the anti-gay ammendment. If you’re a Unitarian Universalist, you might point out that our clergy have been officiating at religious marriages since at least the 1960’s.

And astute reader Craig found a great online drawing that might help Massachusetts legislators understand why same sex couples should not lose the right to marry: Link.

Concert

Every month, downtown New Bedford has an arts and culture night — AHA! Night — with concerts, art exhibits, lectures, and tours. For the past six months, our church has hosted a free classical music concert on AHA! Night. And tonight, Ann Sears, from the music faculty of Wheaton College, played Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

After the concert, Ann told me that the stillness was so profound that she was tempted to look up after the first variation to see whether everyone had walked out. I told her that was my experience of New Bedford audiences as well; that sometimes when I’m preaching everyone’s so quiet I wonder if anyone is actually listening; and I think maybe it’s a cultural combination of New England Yankee reserve and Portuguese politeness and reticence. Yes, said Ann, after the concert people came up to me and told me how moved they had been.

They had been moved. I greeted people as they walked out, and you could see it in their faces. The man who had shouted Brava! at the end of the concert had a transcendent smile. The hip young couple who had literally run in at the beginning of the concert, talking and laughing on their cell phones, went out smiling and she gave me a thumbs-up sign — Good, she mouthed (she was on her cell phone again). Everett, who’s a poet, stopped to talk with me for a while. Wow, said Everett, wow. I said to him, My head’s in a different place than when I came in.

I walked Ann out to her car. She said, It’s such a good thing to have free concert series like this. You know, I said, there were at least a couple of people there who didn’t have two nickels to rub together. She said, I thought so. And, I said, there was one woman who had just come back from chemotherapy today; this was very healing for her. Ann said, Yes. I said, You don’t get that kind of audience in a concert hall. Ann said, I know; I’d love to come back and play again.

Not watching spring…

Every May for the past five years, it has happened.

The spring migration of birds is one of the most spectacular events in the natural world, and the peak of the spring migration occurs in May. If you’re good (and a little bit lucky), you can see a hundred different bird species in one day, including birds that have flown thousands of miles to get this far, with hundreds of miles yet to go before they reach their summer breeding grounds. It is one of the wonders of the natural world.

Every May for the past five years, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to spend a day in the field looking for birds. And it’s happening again this year.

Sigh.

Email [curse | blessing] pick one

Yesterday’s issue of The New York Times Book Review reviews a new book called Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. The review was written by Dave Barry, and it sounds pretty much like everything Dave Barry has ever written, except that he doesn’t make any potty jokes.

Fortunately, the online version of the review has a link to the first chapter of the book. Here’s an excerpt that pretty much sums up the book’s purpose:

So what is it about email? Why do we send so many electronic messages that we never should have written? Why do things spin out of control so quickly? Why don’t people remember that email leaves an indelible electronic record? Why do we forget to compose our messages carefully so that people will know what we want without having to guess? We wrote this book to figure out why email has such a tendency to go awry — and to learn for ourselves how to email not just adequately but also well. Our Holy Grail: email that is so effective that it cuts down on email.

Those are good questions, and I think maybe I need this book. Some weeks, I spend two hours or more a day reading and writing email. Some days (today!) I find myself spending forty minutes carefully writing and rewriting an email message, when a five-minute phone call would have been more effective. Email is frustrating. Email is extremely useful. Somehow, I need to learn to make better use of email.

So I’m going to start a short series of posts on using email more effectively in churches and other small non-profits. Not that I know how to use email more effectively than you do — but if I put down some preliminary ideas, and you respond with better ideas in the comments, we might actually make some progress towards that Holy Grail — email so effective it cuts down on email.

First installment: Meetings via email

For those of us who sit on boards and committees, it is very tempting to save time by using email to conduct business outside of regular meeting times. In my experience, conducting board or committee business via email is ineffective when either (a) it takes longer to conduct the business via email, (b) the business is too complex to conduct via email, or (c) the business item is not presented well initially. Let’s look at these problems one at a time:

(a) It takes longer to conduct the business via email. Emotionally-loaded business items never translate well to email — email discussions have this uncanny ability to go from civil discussion to outright war in less than five seconds — meaning it’s much more efficient to conduct emotionally-loaded business face-to-face. Business items where not all members of the board or committee have the same depth of knowledge never work well via email — the knowledgeable people are constantly re-explaining to the others what’s going on — so here again, face-to-face is better.

(b) The business is too complex to conduct via email. Complex business items do not seem to translate well to email — people ask the same questions over and over again, or the original details get forgotten as the email discussion drags on and on — so it seems more efficient to conduct complex business face-to-face.

(c) The business item is not presented well initially. If you present a business item badly in a face-to-face meeting, you know instantly from the blank looks on people’s faces. Since you don’t get that kind of feedback with email responses, you can find yourself deeply involved in an email discussion only to realize that people have very different understandings of what’s being discussed — in which case, you’re probably better off cutting your losses and postponing the business item until your next face-to-face meeting.

So what kind of committee or board business does work well via email? Well, setting an agenda for a face-to-face meeting works well via email — little emotion involved, no depth of knowledge required, it’s a simple task. In another example, here at First Unitarian in New Bedford the Board of Trustees has to approve all building rental requests, and mostly these routine votes are done via email (in rare instances where a building rental proves contentious, the vote is postponed to a face-to-face meeting). Related to this, routine votes and approvals can often be effectively handled via email. Finally, email is very useful to distribute staff reports or subcommittee reports prior to a face-to-face meeting.

There must be other examples where committee or board business is conducted effectively via email — what examples do you have from your own experience? Has your committee or board come up with any magic techniques for carying out effective business via email?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part two

Noted with comment

I’m lucky I’m a religious liberal, because religious liberals find absolutely no contradiction between the poetic truth of the Bible and the scientific truth of evolution. However, as reported in the New York Times on May 5, in an article titled “A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin,” that is not true for some of the candidates for the Republican nomination for President:

[T]he [Republican] party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three — Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado — indicated they did not.

Silly boys:– saying they do not “believe” in evolution because their religion forbids them to. Yet their religion tells them that their God is omniscient and omnipotent. If their God is omniscient, then that God understands the difference between scientific evidence and metaphor; and if their God is omnipotent, then that God knows how to use metaphor in the Bible to communicate eternal truths.

Silly Sam Brownback. Silly Mike Huckabee. Silly Tom Tancredo. Don’t you think your God is smart enough to understand science and metaphor both? (And don’t you know that you’re embarrassing many of your politically conservative friends whose God is smart enough to understand that?)

In the comments, Philocrites, a.k.a. Chris, shows me where I’m wrong. I reply, admit he’s right, and try to recover my balance. Although I still say you should vote for one of the other Republican candidates.

Reading Boswell

Over the past ten years, I’ve been desultorily reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Today we’d call it a masterpiece of non-fiction that combines psychological insight, reportage, collage, anecdote, and narrative. But really, it’s a book about the moral and spiritual life of a public intellectual.

Last night, I came to this passage:

1777: Ætat. 68.]–In 1777, it appears from his Prayers and Meditations, that Johnson suffered much from a state of mind “unsettled and perplexed,” and from that constitutional gloom, which, together with his extreme humility and anxiety with regard to his religious state, made him contemplate himself through too dark and unfavourable a medium. It may be said of him, the he “saw God in the clouds.” Certain we may be of his injustice to himself in the following lamentable paragraph, which it is painful to think came from the contrite heart of this great man, to whose labors the world is so much indebted: “When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of the mind, very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults, and excuse many deficiencies.” …

If Boswell were writing today, he would no doubt attempt to psychoanalyze Johnson; he would find that Johnson lacked sexual outlet following the untimely death of his wife, that Johnson’s “constitutional gloom” was in fact a clinical depression which could have been cleared up with a mood-elevating drug, that Johnson had Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that the disability of being blind in one eye (the result of a childhood bout with scrofula) affected him throughout his life. And if Boswell lived here in the United States, he probably would have gotten infected with our national mythology that the “pursuit of happiness” is the highest good, and he would have recommended a combination of psychoanalysis and happy consumerism to end Johnson’s woes.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have surveyed my own life and thought, What a barren waste of time! –How little I have done (nothing, really) to leave the world better than it was I came into it! Better to say what is true than hide behind a bland psychologizing:– The usual liberal psychotherapy provides a pitifully meager answer to the question, How ought I to live out my life? Nor do the conservative platitudes of our time offer anything more; they just cloak psychology and pointless pursuit of happiness in strident nationalism or religious excess.

So we find more and more essentially sane people getting diagnosed as crazy-depressed and dosed up with anti-depressants. Our public discourse doesn’t allow us to carefully and honestly survey our lives, let alone admit that when we do survey our lives we are likely to find a good deal that is barren. Last night I took a long walk, thinking about what I’ve done with my life; and I found much that was barren. Anyone who is honest would find the same. What to do? Having already rejected strident nationalism, prosperity theology, religious fundamentalism, bland psychotherapy, over-medication, happiness through consumption, and a few other pointless things, I settled on some good honest soul-searching. I was not particularly happy to do so, and it’s never pleasant to realize that the barrenness of one’s own life is in part a reflection of the barrenness of public life. My deficiencies and faults didn’t go away. But when I went to sleep, my dreams were rich and untroubled, and I awakened with renewed energy.

May afternoon

Three o’clock on a beautiful bright May afternoon in Davis Square. I walked out of McIntyre and Moore Used Books, blinking at the sun. Two cops were standing just outside the door, looking down the street.

“… why I don’t like him,” said one cop to her partner.

“He’s a troublemaker,” the other cop replied.

“Well, let’s try not to antagonize him.”

They were slowly moving up the street on the edge of the sidewalk. Without thinking about it, I moved over to the other side of the sidewalk, next to the buildings.

Twenty feet further along, a man was just sitting on the edge of the curb. Corduroy sport coat, much the worse for wear; slicked back messy hair; filthy bike messenger bag over his shoulder. He had to concentrate hard in order to sit down — drunk, or strung out on something.

A third cop was talking to the man saying, “No, you got in trouble because…”

I didn’t wait to hear what the cop was going to say. When you pass three cops lined up waiting to deal with one guy, it’s always best to keep walking. I threaded my way through the hipsters and students who populate Davis Square during the day, walking along under the bright sunshine of a May afternoon.

No Internet access yesterday, so I’m posting this a day after the fact.