Subscribe Choose a better tool than email for some of your communication jobs.
Mark Hurst has been blogging about email bankruptcy a fair amount recently – the idea that overwhelmed executives sometimes feel there’s no option but to delete their inboxes and start again. With estimates saying that the average knowledge worker will send/receive 199 corporate emails per day by 2010, it’s clear that something is very wrong.
Mark lambastes a number of people for asking for a technological solution to the problem. He also advocates a change in behaviour – his “bit literacy” approach. All sensible enough – but then I noted that there already is a technological solution the problem. Sort of.
But first you have to reframe the question. Intead of “how can I get through email with less pain?” try this one: “How can I optimise the way I communicate overall?”
My colleague Kelsey Smith has been working on a project for a global organisation that makes it money handing information. His experience there showed him an organisation thriving by using a range of different communications media:
“Email is a blunt knife. So they use multiple channels, each with different properties and used in different scenarios. Email is a data flow – a continuous stream of low-urgency background conversations happening on various lists. Blogs and Twitter fulfil a similar purpose: context. Instant messaging is used for near-synchronous conversations without being as intrusive as a phone call. And face-to-face conversation is used for urgent and complex subjects that require focus and nuance.”
So – the best solution to email overload comes from selecting the right medium for each conversation you want to have.
Try an experiment. Find a contact or colleague who is already a happy to use IM. Next time you want to sort something out with them, force yourself to use IM instead of email. See if you get better results with less effort. It worked for me.
I could be way off, of course. Jakob Nielsen classified IM as “information pollution” back in 2004. And Linda Stone reminds us that monitoring too many information channels at once can be very stressful.
On the other hand, Facebook has just introduced chat, and GMail has had built-in chat for several years. And plenty of younger users dismiss email as too much bother. (If you are going to use email, here as some good tips from a 19-year-old).
We have a landscape of communication tools – including blogs, wikis, twitter IM and email. Using them right, can help stave off email bankruptcy.
I am not sure if such a tool is available yet, but our current email programs have some of these features, but they are not “connected” properly. I dislike emails in my inbox. I need to deal with them. But some emails requires future actions. So why can’t I convert my current email into a ToDo item (with a simple right click) for the future and remove it from my inbox? We must stop looking at email as email.
PS: I think the Gootodo created by Good Experience deals with future Todo lists, but not emails yet.
Our concern over communication over-load may be more about control than attention – email allows complex archiving and management of data. Are we worried about the lack of centralised control of disparate conversations?
Not long ago Jacob Nielsen said email will become truly useful when user-generated documents (word, PSD etc) are integrated…somehow. Perhaps we need a communication center that archives and tracks our conversations. Perhaps we can centralise data streams and decide how to consume based on their content or source…a communication aggregator.
Thanks for the comments, guys.
Wasn’t Outlook supposed to be your single integrated thingy – managing todo items and emails and more. Somehow it managed to be quite un-joined-up though. IS 2007 any better?
I think the GMail team are doing a good job archiving chats and mails in a fabulously searchable single spot. But is there a GMail todo list? If there is, I want to know about it.
Relevant article from Usability news.
References a study with interesting stats:
– 45 minutes a day dealing with unwanted email
– we are losing around 20 days a year of productive working time.
– 81.3% of people think others do not use the ‘cc’ function correctly
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4715.asp
This article considers the lack of ‘training’ in effective email us as a contributor to email overload.
Maybe email is harmless in small, contained groups but wasteful and inefficient beyond a certain threshold.