So I’ve been seeing Seriousity mentioned here and there on the internet, and today, there was a segment about it on NPR focusing on its new e-mail “game.”. The basic premise is that employees in large organizations get swamped with so many e-mails that they have trouble figuring out what’s important and what isn’t, and this leads to inefficiency and loss of productivity.

Seriousity’s solution? An e-mail “cap-and-trade” system. All users are given an allowance of “Serios” every week, and must attach them to any e-mails they send. If you are sending an important e-mail, you can attach more Serios to it, and people’s inboxes would be sorted by Serio value.

First, there’s an ambiguity that I’m not clear on, and that is what happens to Serios after they are sent. One possibility is that they simply expire on arrival, the other is that recipients can turn around and attach the Serios they receive to outgoing mail, and the Serios would expire after a set amount of time. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. But more importantly, there are serious design flaws inherent in the system, because imposing artificial scarcity on an infinite good is never sustainable.

How would mailing lists work? If I send to a list, does every recipient get an equal share that sums up to the total Serios I put in, or would my original Serio get magically replicated? If the former, would there be “cents” of a Serio? If the latter, what if I just set up mailing lists for everyone I knew and used it in all occasions to save Serios?

Perhaps the biggest issue that stands out is external communications - no organization is an island, so how do e-mails with the outside world get sorted? Do outgoing e-mails require Serios? Do incoming ones get sent to the bottom because they don’t have Serios? The ideal solution to this would be if everyone in the world adopted the Serio system. But even then, questions arise - would there be some sort of governing body that determines how many Serios every person gets? Would I be able to get more Serios by signing up for several Hotmail accounts? Or to take it from the other direction… if everyone, or at least every company, could set their own allowances, what’s to stop spammers from giving themselves infinitely many Serios and flooding your box with one million Serio ads for Cialis?

The answer in this case isn’t an arbitrary and artificial stamp. If organizations want their employees to use e-mail more productively, teach them to use the existing tools their mail clients have for sorting and filtering, along with a little common sense about when to send and check mail.