Firstly, imagine the sort of cinematic pyre usually reserved for the final ‘baddie’ in movies. Now, visualize shoving all your email into it. Great or what?!

There are so many issues with companies reliance on email but I’ll put a few out there…

• Encourages silos within the business
• Encourages political game playing
• People may not have equal access to the information they need in real time or historically
• Email overload means many people don’t respond to your messages
• Often used in place of a call/meeting where a conversation would last minutes at most
• Encourages the deferring of issues or passing them around rather than resolving them
• Ridiculously hard to refer back to/search in to find historical information
• Encourages a reliance on file/attachments which then get lost – usually breaks any sort of documentation version control
• Messages are often miss-interpreted by the receiver
• Usually the message is without necessary context to enable the recipient to actually make a decision

Now I completely understand that people are very used to email however it’s a legacy of the business processes we used. All it is is an electronic memo.

I’m sure the same stupid ‘did you get my memo?’ games were played then and all email does is perpetuate the same silo organisational structure.

We’ve got access to excellent project management, scheduling, knowledge base and workflow tools that mean everyone can get/see/ and most importantly share the information in an open forum.

We began using Slack at work – it’s amazeballs because it fosters far more open communication among team members and across teams.

In a modern business where people have to collaborate then almost everything should be open and accessible internally. Email works against this goal.

I’ve had a blog (on a totally different subject) for ages. It was hosted on WordPress but no longer reflected who I am now or my interests. It was old but letting go of it was hard.

I had another site/blog which contained some more recent ideas but it was not polished and while looking at Go I ran into Hugo. It’s a static site generator written in Go. It’s lovely.

I wanted to start putting my professional thoughts out there ’cause I’ve really grown to enjoy the whole process of software development. I’m not yet very good at the technical parts but since there’s a lot of human communication and so-on involved the challenges are really interesting.

I got hung up on the yak shaving required to actually build/restructure and deploy my blog using Hugo. It was in the back of my mind but was easy to put off. I fell into the trap whereby I’d decided how I wanted to do something (using Go and Hugo) while forgetting the actual goal was to put my stance on a couple of things out into the world.

This can happen when writing or fulfilling user stories too. You can dive straight into the implementation detail and ignore the over-arching goal which may mean you don’t have to really write much code at all. Maybe the end result could be achieved with fewer steps?

There’s a temptation to be restrictive and provide detailed guidance as to how something should be achieved. The underlying problem here is that this approach robs people of agency over how to reach a solution. If you’ve been told exactly how to do something there’s no ownership as you’re just following someone else’s plan. If it happens to fail then the easy out is to point out that it wasn’t your plan therefore you’re not to blame.

It finally hit me. My underlying goal was to remove my old content and replace it with something more relevant to me at this point in time. The what has been achieved by expediently sacrificing the how. I didn’t (yet) port the blog to Hugo but the end result I wanted has been achieved.

Users mainly care about what happens, not how.