Why Do We Still Write Emails at Work?

If you have googled this question, you are not alone. Apparently, thousands of people are wondering “What the heck is email for? Why do we have to do this?”

It’s a good question. The answer is partially historical and partially practical.

Historical Answer

What came before emails?

You can do this. How did people write to each other before the internet?

…

That’s right. Letters!

For thousands of year, people have been writing letters. The weird thing is we still do. We’ve developed so many new ways to communicate and yet the old ones are still with us. (My mail delivery person just drove by as I was typing this)

And businesses used letters to transact business, but then needed a way to get information to more than one person effectively — again, pre-internet. So the memo was invented.

Memos— which is short for memorandum, which is a fancy, Latin way of saying “you’re supposed to remember this” — were informational documents that could be passed from one person to another in an office, each person reading the content and having to remember it. They were different times.