This is a topic that has been examined for quite a while now. I remember a few years ago there was a story (I believe on NPR) where a company started a no email day. Every friday, you could not use internal email (external email to customers etc. was still allowed). They found after people adapted, they not only managed very well, but they cut down usage the other days too. I’m looking at my email trails today and have several “conversations” that went back and forth with one or two liners several times. A 30 second phone call would have worked better. I guess knowing what is right and doing it are different things.

This may be so obvious and taken for granted that no one else has bothered to make this comment:

Back when I was in the industry (when OS 8 was really something Nu) I used to do a lot of management consulting. It started as “added value” for my application development and eventually became the core of my product. I would say 90+% of the management nightmares I stepped into were miss-maps of accountability and responsibility. In your Google seminar one of the employees talked about a support request being sent to a group and people holding back waiting for someone else to answer. That’s a miss-map of accountability. Most people want to take credit for accomplishments while avoiding dangerous “black holes” (for lack of a better metaphor); Most corporate cultures inadvertently or deliberately promote a culture where success is measured by ones ability to pass the buck (batting the ball back across the net). I had a fortune 500 client where I could not hold an effective meeting because the culture had evolved to believe that “Everyone” needed to be invited to every meeting and no felt they had the responsibility to commit to anything. I agree there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with email, but it should be no surprise that the ills of corporate culture manifest themselves there like everywhere else.

Hi folks!

I try to take a measured approach to email, recognizing its usefulness as well as its faults. That being said, I’m trying to get to Inbox Zero but am also struggling with the fact that email can be a really great way to ensure that communication flows smoothly. To use an example, if there’s a misunderstanding about a deliverable (“do you want 2 of these or 3?”), a saved email can be very helpful. My inclination is usually to delete those emails, which helps clear my mind, but leaves me with no good proof/paper trail later to refer to.

Has anyone else dealt with this issue? Right now, I’m using folders to deal with it, which works to a degree.

Our company instituted what they call the “email diet” one afternoon a week, essentially the same as the no-email Fridays described above. Since much of our work involves team collaboration, being able to send one email and be sure that everyone involved has the same information at the same time just makes sense. How much less productive is it to call or visit six people to convey one piece of info? Meantime, it’s impossible to get any focused work done during the “diet” because people who are abiding by it (initially it was presented as mandatory, with penalties for violation, but that almost started a riot; there’s still pressure from management, though) are constantly sticking their heads in your office to tell you something that doesn’t require immediate action. Whereas if the info is emailed, we can deal with it when we’re done with the task at hand. As one of my group put it, we’d get exactly the same amount done on email diet afternoons if we closed for a few hours.

The proponents of the email diet say that they find the constant barrage of emails distracting; they feel they have to read each one when the little chime sounds. So shut off the chime. Exit the program if you’re too inclined to look at it all the time. Is that really so complicated?

I get a lot of email. As a supervisor, I often get cc’d on all those group emails for the various teams, as well as pretty much anything anybody thinks I might need to know for some reason. It’s a lot. But I triage the box a couple times a day (reading the last email in the thread, for example, to find out the upshot rather than wading through each email), file a lot without reading it because I don’t need the info today but will want it later when I am dealing with that thing, delegate by forwarding with a comment, and in the remainder search on my nickname (what people call me, as opposed to my full first name, which is my email address) in the body for questions or instructions that might be directed specifically to me. (This also separates the people who know me personally from the ones who don’t, which in my job helps prioritize a great deal.) No different than wading through my paper in box, and usually faster because no physical object has to be moved.

This wouldn’t work for everyone, of course, but it works for me. The email diet, OTOH, I find to be a hindrance.

(Ironically, the weekly email diet is announced with a reminder email to everyone in the company. Which gets filtered straight into my trash.)

So while I do agree email can be overload, for those who interface with non-tech folks I think email is underutilized.

If there is something that can be quickly answered with one line or two lines (I’ve been staying to the under five sentence suggestion very well), I see no problem with a quick email.

However, many times, non-techs want a thirty minute phone call on something that can be a 30 second email. It’s just not worth the time for all of that. Especially when you work in a technological field and they don’t.

How to bridge the gap of spending literally three or four hours on the phone a day talking about nonsense that could be handled in 20 minutes of email, and then real work can begin?

True that “top-down” will not change company culture, how top management handles their email will set the example for the rest of the company.

Example; People on get a response from their email between 2 and 4 every day from top execs because they are doing work the rest of the day and refused to be interrupted (of course, for this to work, they can not yell at subordinates for not answering email immediately).

BTW, email as a paper trail is key. I have huge (backe up) archive files.

Pure and simply email is just a tool, a means of communication. If too much time is being spent on unproductive communication, you prioritize, streamline and enhance efficiency. The exact same applies to emails.

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