I remember a time before email. Some of my first jobs were mostly based on paper being moved from person to person. I'm sure some of you remember these envelopes being used to communicate between individuals in an organization. I used those to send and get memorandums from others before we implemented email. Fortunately, our email implementation (cc:Mail) came soon after I started working in corporations.

Initially, people treated email much like paper mail inside organizations. However, over time, people started to treat email differently. It was easy to send an email around other work, so people started to send more messages than they ever would have with paper. They started to dash off notes quickly, sometimes too quickly, as an email might be followed by another email that includes a "I forgot this". As instant messaging grew, we saw similar patterns where people were quick to send messages, regardless of whether they were important, well-thought-out, or even necessary.

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