
Is Email Making Professors Stupid? - JohnJamesRambo
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid
======
gnicholas
I'm intrigued by the story of Donald Knuth, which I've seen bandied about
lately. One critical fact that is always missing: while he may have given up
email in 1990, he retired to emeritus status in 1993.

> _In 1968 Knuth joined the faculty at Stanford University, and served until
> his retirement in 1993, after which he was designated Professor Emeritus of
> the Art of Computer Programming._ [1]

What's the difference between being an active-duty professor and an emeritus
professor? It means he didn't have to teach classes, do much (any?)
departmental service, or be in active communication with administrators. All
of these things require email these days, which is why other professors can't
"pull a Knuth".

So while folks like to trot out the story of Donald Knuth, we should keep in
mind the context. He's not a regular professor, or even a regular senior
professor. He is — and has been since 1993 — an emeritus professor who has
practically no day-to-day responsibilities at the University.

1: [https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-
technology/c...](https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-
technology/computers-and-computing-biographies/donald-e-knuth)

~~~
RachelF
His website [1] claims he is retired. He goes on to saying how he is like a
hermit and needs long batches on un-interrupted time. Worth a look, he's an
interesting fellow.

1: [https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html](https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html)

~~~
gnicholas
Emeritus is basically retired. You have continued access to university
resources, but little/nothing is required of you. Source: my wife happens to
be a professor at the same university.

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gaxun
The author should have written to Donald Knuth with an interview request for
this piece. It would have added something special beyond just repeating what's
already visible on his website.

I wrote to Professor Knuth about a project I did a year or two ago and was
pleasantly surprised to receive a two page handwritten note in response. So it
seems like the no-email filter is probably still working well for him.

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TwelveNights
Huge amounts of uninterrupted time of course gives us the ability to deep-dive
into certain subjects, but there's obviously the necessity of asynchronous
communication that doesn't move at postal speeds. Having said that though,
frequent context switches really make a huge difference on how productive I am
in a day. I remember reading somewhere that checking your email at a rate of
even once or twice an hour is enough to effectively kill your productivity for
cognitively heavy tasks.

The fact that he has his secretary print out emails for him to write responses
onto is a little hardcore, but I imagine that it tremendously helps with
keeping his life distraction-free.

~~~
colechristensen
Startup Idea:

An email service that only delivers messages once or twice a day.

~~~
taneq
In Thunderbird, go to 'Options > Account Settings', select 'Server Settings'
for the server you want to limit from the list on the left, and change the
'Check for new messages every' field to 720 (or however many minutes you want
between emails).

I'm certain there are equivalent settings in most email clients.

Edit: Updated seconds to minutes, I misread the form. Although I'm happy to
report that you can set it to check every 43200 minutes if you so desire. :)

~~~
colechristensen
It is also possible to just not check your email more than once a day, but
that's not really the point (which was mostly a joke)

Email tends to be fairly useless in organizations because people don't read
them and are overwhelmed by messages nobody needs to read. Slack and the like
capitalize on being different from email by being instant and easy, what if
someone else could capitalize on being slow and encouraging not-interrupting-
people and putting thought into long form communication. (how many meetings
have we all been to that should have been three sentences in an email?)

~~~
taneq
Email is indispensable in organisations because it automatically creates a
comprehensive permanent record of all communications (and optimally, one which
is searchable after the employee in question has left - keep your work and
personal emails separate, people!) Searching old emails for information is a
core part of my workflow and has saved my bacon more times than I can count.

~~~
taneq
(Further to this - I've made it standard practice to send an email after any
important phone call, summarizing the conclusions of the phone call. That way
both parties have a record of what I thought we decided, and if the other
party doesn't disagree then their tacit acceptance is also recorded.)

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mizzao
In regards to the question of whether professors should be managers or
monastics: professors _are_ essentially managers.

Supervising a research group is engineering manager, product manager, project
manager, marketing manager, career coach, and fundraiser all in one. Most
professors aren't trained in management unfortunately, because one doesn't
(usually) learn those skills during a PhD.

Most generally accepted management techniques would make any professor more
effective.

(source: I have a PhD, worked in research including briefly as a professor,
and am now in a startup)

~~~
gnicholas
You're describing STEM professors. Humanities professors don't manage research
teams or fundraise much. Ditto social science, for the most part.

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User23
Are wet streets making it rain?

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tomglynch
/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid

Interactive?

All it was was a GIF in the header yeah?

~~~
majewsky
I'm very comfortable with this specific level of interactivity. :)

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Groxx
tl;dr seems to be "get an assistant so you can focus".

yea, I imagine that helps quite a bit. but it doesn't really address the
problem, nor is it accessible to the vast majority of people.

~~~
colechristensen
Honestly, it should be.

Take the amount of productivity amplification you can get with assistants and
pay the assistant 80% of that. It doesn't have to be 'everybody gets a
personal assistant'.

Managers and PMs and the like should be taking on these kinds of roles, but in
my experience they either don't do it or they turn it into micromanaging which
makes things more, not less difficult.

