I’ve been reading a lot lately about how to manage email and how between facebook and twitter you can do 90% of your job. And I’ve come to believe that most people, as the central function of their job, do nothing other than chat rather trivially with other people. Because I simply cannot do my job in 140 characters or less. I can’t do five sentence emails. Most of the work emails I get reveal to me that the people I work with haven’t the slightest clue what’s going on at any given moment on any given project. The occasional brain dump is required. I still document my code, if you can believe that.

In fact, the main service I provide, in a very detailed usually concise fashion, is the interpretation of vague and incorrect assumptions into working, usable processes and applications. Tell me how that’s going to get done over twitter?

I’m sorry to say it, but in the real world we write the specification as we go. We morph the process on a daily basis. And unfortunately that requires a little more documentation and accountability than you get from MySpace and YouTube. In the real world we work with SVN and SQL Server and FTP and Terminal Services and FogBugz and wikis and virtualization and yes, oddly enough, email. Occasionally we pass around a Word document. Shocking, huh?