NudgeNote: My kind of email assistant (II/II)
Couple of weeks back, we wrote about NudgeNote, an email assistant that can help you write better, actionable emails with a gentle nudge that picks up incomplete response with added context for the sender to correct.
As we continued the discussion, it struck us that not everyone might want such an assistant.
After all, who likes a “You are doing something wrong, make it better” assistant?
And sometimes, the person responding to the email might be implementing a “Getting Things Done” philosophy, i.e., they have an email to triage, and they want to just respond to it and get it out of their way, assuming someone else will pick up the slack. So what’s a good email assistant for such a person? Well, we could design the nudge in a better and more emotionally appealing manner, or just actually solve the problem with organisation wide awareness, i.e., NudgeNote could say something like, “Raj needs to sign this document, can we instead just email him and ask him to sign?”
It became clear that sometimes no assistant can help the person sending the email, and then, another light bulb goes off in my PM’s head “How about we have an email assistant play the bad guy for the person receiving the email?”
Here is yet another flow for NudgeNote.
NudgeNote, my email assistant, reads this email instead of the owner. In the event an email response is unclear or ambiguous (read: rambles on!), it does two things:
Does not show this email to the owner at all (or maybe just not on the primary email tab in GMail)
Send a response message back to the corresponder, NOT on the owner’s behalf, but as NudgeNote itself!
Here is how we envision such a response would look like.
What’s the advantage of this approach?
We figured if the sender is just applying the “Getting Things Done” process incorrectly, they would first pay more attention to the email, since they did not ‘get things done’. NudgeNote is useful to them since it has pointed out the core issue, and they can now ‘get things done’ by solving the core issue.
So, combining the two approaches, i.e., NudgeNote stopping an email from being sent, or stopping an email from being delivered, the assistant could benefit all well meaning parties.
However, what about the ones who are deliberately avoiding responding to the core issue? We think their core motivation is not to get things done, but posture in front of others that they have ‘responded’ to the issue. Using the second approach, i.e., refusing delivery of the email, and letting them know about it (and maybe in a follow up email, everyone else on the thread) allows for NudgeNote to play the ‘bad guy’ i.e., gently calling them out on their non-response. Is it productive? Will it actually nudge the responder to provide a proper response? We don’t know but at least the responder doesn’t get to have the emotional satisfaction of having ‘responded’ to the email, and no plausible deniability when they actually meet the sender face to face for a follow up. We can extend the principle to allow for actions from the sender and the receiver to override certain recommendations, or request for a call to clarify, etc., which is better since it fosters active meaningful communication.
