Book review: The Spirit Level - Why Equality is Better for Everyone

Over a year ago I read the book "The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone" but it's only today I take the time to share my thoughts about it.

First, it's clearly a book anyone should read because of the importance of its conclusions. Some of those conclusions are probably wrong, but the core of them are probably right and it's serious work on a crucial topic for the future of our civilization. Sadly, the book has one major flaw: it's boring. Some writers have succeeded in writing about arid stuff in an engaging and exciting way. They haven't. That said, yes yes, read the book, or at least read the Wikipedia article about it:

The book argues that there are "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption". It claims that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment,obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.

 And the first review on Wikipedia:

In a review for Nature, Michael Sargent said that The Spirit Level used "statistics from reputable independent sources" and was "a brave and imaginative effort to understand the intractable social problems that face rich democratic countries". He also noted that “The idea that income inequality within a society is more unsettling to health and welfare than income differences between societies has been hotly debated for more than two decades. In the past year alone [2009], six academic analyses have been published in peer-reviewed journals, four of which contradict the hypothesis on statistical grounds. Yet Wilkinson and Pickett do not address these criticisms in their book”. He went on to say, "How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem".

This book generated plenty of discussions and more research. If you want to dive deeper, you'll find a lot of documentation on The Equality Trust website.

And because you're probably curious to see how your own country fares, see this list of countries by inequality-adjusted HDI.

Review of 'The Hamster Revolution', or why mastering email matters

You probably get and send at least 20 emails per work day, if so, this means you deal with over 5,000 emails per year, and if you're like me, you likely get much more emails than this. That's why it matters, and maybe even crucial, to take the time to enhance the methods you use to deal with email. And you know what? Most funny fact is that most of us never get any training on how to use and manage email. It is a wonderful and efficient way of communicating, but wrongly used, it can quickly become a burden and a source of dissatisfaction to you and your colleagues.

That's the main issue that "The Hamster Revolution: How to manage your email before it manages you" by Mike Song, Vicki Halsey and Tim Burress tries to hammer. In my opinion, the book fails to provide all the necessary ingredients to really improve how you manage emails, but it doesn't mean this book is useless or the topic isn't an important one, on the contrary. Despite my seemingly harsh critic, there are still very good concepts and suggestions in the book. The authors claim you can save weeks of your precious professional time every year by integrating their strategies into your workflow.

** The first strategy put forward by the book focuses on email quantity. In short, before sending an email, you have to answer a few questions related to whether an email is really needed (e.g. timely, relevant and complete), appropriate and targeted (carefully selecting recipients).

** The second strategy revolves around email quality. In short, subjects must be insightful and revealing, the body must clearly provide minimal background information and a summary of required actions, etc.

** The third strategy is about teaching and influencing your entourage to themselves send you better emails (quantity and quality).

** The fourth strategy is central to the book, and also its weakest part. This last strategy focuses on email organization and management. The authors claim their proposed COTA categorization scheme (COTA = Clients, Outputs, Team and Admin) is the one size fits all solution, while I believe it's actually one size fits none!

They clearly attempt to provide a solution tied to a single email software setup (namely MS Outlook), while not discussing the severe limitations of this software solution. Because of this, the powerfulness of some email software capabilities are not addressed at all, such as:

• Instant intelligent email search results, such as provided by Spotlight
• Smart folders (aka Saved search folders)
• Email tags (aka labels), built in Gmail for example

Of course, you might end up not using smart folders or tags, but they may also become central to your preferred way of categorizing emails.

They oversee or ignore several elements of email management, providing little (in the annex) to no discussion on important issues such as:

• Managing incoming emails and the inbox, classification of emails and items with required actions associated to it
• Displaying emails as threads
• Deleting emails, what to keep and what to delete (including in the sent mail folder)
• IMAP vs POP3 email protocols: the main differences and why you should care which one you're using
• Backing up emails
• Plain text emails vs rich html emails
• Addressbook: synchronization, smart groups, LDAP, tags, etc

I can't recommend the book because of the too many shortcomings, but this does not mean the topic isn't of major interest to our daily work, on the contrary! On the positive side, the book is short, only 106-pages and pleasant to read.

I don't think this book will significantly modify my own email workflow - it's already rather elaborate and I'm revisiting it regularly. Of course, I could dare claim that my email problems lie with my colleagues and relatives, not within my own way of doing things! ;-)


Related to the topic, you can read my previous review of 'Getting Things Done' and mention of 'Keeping Found Things Found'.