Yahoo Finance Overdue Idea: The ACK(knowledge) button
THE ISSUE: Tuesday morning at the office. You struggle through meetings, conference calls and paperwork, scratching to find time to secure a 10 a.m. caffeine boost. Finally, you find five minutes to catch up on a day’s worth of emails.
You scan through your unreads, looking for the important stuff, but it’s like finding a needle in a cyber haystack of unnecessary replies.
“I’ll get right on it,” reads a response to a previous day’s missive. You roll your eyes and trash it.
“Sounds good,” says another, this one a reply-all to a company-wide email you didn’t need to see in the first-place.
You realize your next meeting is about to start, and you abandon your task, with potentially important messages still buried in a pile of clutter that will only be larger when you return.
THE VICTIMS: Try and calculate how much of your day you spend sending and answering emails, tweeting, commenting on blogs and Facebook posts… Actually, don’t calculate it, because you don’t have time. You’re too busy fishing through all that e-crap that doesn’t qualify as spam, but it might as well.
A boss fires off an email asking a subordinate to do something. Does there need to be a reply? Maybe you want to let the boss know that you got the message, but even a simple “great, thanks” needs to be clicked on, read, and disposed of. But it’s often more than that, because it’s tough to resist the urge to add something else to show how engaged you are in the task, maybe plant the seed that you’re the right choice for the next promotion. Now you’re just wasting everyone’s time.
Add in those lovely chain mails, where a message ostensibly to one person is CC’d to 25 others just to “keep y’all in the loop” and you’ve got a potential replyallcalypse on your hands. By the time you’re done dealing with all that, the mouse battery needs replacing and the on the way to treat your carpal tunnel syndrome.
And it’s not just in the office. Do you really need a response to the email you sent your spouse to pick up steak seasoning on the way home? No, you don’t.
THE FIX: That we all have email on pocketphones is a concept that was mind-blowing just a decade ago, but the etiquette around it is still a work in progress. Some people use email receipts, but those are clunky, they give you another message to delete, and it requires the sender to take the initiative.
The ACK button would be an addition to the current email response options of reply, reply all, and forward. Any message that does not require a fulsome thought-out answer could be ‘ACKed’ with a quick click that would send a three-second pop-up to the recipient letting them know the message had been read. No more pointless replies, replies on replies, and replies on replies on replies (which we all know actually does happen).
The boss would know the instructions have been received, the worker bee doesn’t have to waste time coming up with a clever response, and the Interweb tubes become a bit less clogged. Now, if only we could figure out how to kill those out-of-office responses…
