Email overload vs. Email education

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

There's a lot of people out there at the moment who say they hate email, that it's a serious problem, and email overload is ruining our working lives. While I understand the issues people have with their email inbox, I'm with those who say that email itself is not the problem.

How can it be? As the chorus of anti-email sentiment increases, Research In Motion - makers of the Blackberry, have also posted 2.18 million new users in the first quarter of 2008. That's 20% more than originally expected. Apple's gadget of the century, the iPhone, didn't have secure enterprise email and it's a big selling point of the new version expected out in June.

Let's be clear about one thing. People have used written messages for a long time. Currently, email is the written message status quo and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.  It's fast, global, easily obtainable, widely used and is the main source of communication for most of the time. Regardless of notions that teenagers think it's quaint and for old people, those quaint old people (everyone in business who's not a teenager?), still predominantly use email, and they will for a good few years yet. Email is actually a pretty handy thing.

As Matt Moore explains in this presentation and several other posts, our problems with email are not with email per se, it's the way we use it. It's our own email behaviours and the melting pot that email inboxes have become. Everything and anything can go in an email. But, just because it can, doesn't mean it should.

Without too much hassle there are methods for improving email use. In fact there are pages and pages dedicated to this idea.

These type of improvements for how email is used show some smart thinking in light of the the situation we're faced with and, as Matt includes in his presentation, providing people with other tools that help do certain jobs better is another step forward. For example:

• Instant messenger applications for quick chats and questions, even file transfers (and the teens prefer it, of course).
• Shared, editable documents in a central location - think Google Docs, wikis etc. - can vastly reduce the constant confusion of swapping of files and the inherent danger of something being overwritten or work being done on the wrong document.
• RSS can cut down mass e-mails, and streamline information into more relevant subjects.
• Even something like Twitter can cut down email by providing people with a space to chatter quickly and easily (from the desktop) without clogging up inboxes, because sometimes at work people want to chat and they use the only available channel that's not the phone.

Matt's coining of the phrase "Peak Email" (a la Peak Oil), is a point well made. We have to get smarter with how we use it. We have to educate on its use and provide alternative communication methods when and where relevant (incidentally, I'm currently reading this book that repeats over and over that the fundamental problem with oil is that there is no viable alternative).

Most of all, we have to be completely pragmatic and realistic when dealing with the problem. The written message is not going to go away, and mobile email and message devices are getting even more popular. It's time to work with email and focus on making it better, rather than keep getting annoyed with it.

Comments

[Mariana Sarceda]

You've really stroke a cord with this post. As you say, in-boxes are a sort of melting box where you don't know what will appear. I try to limit the e-mail use as much as I can. For short conversations I just move to the person's desk or talk it over the phone. I don't check my inbox every single second either. It was a bit hard at the beginning but it made my life easier in the end.

[Sheetal]

I use C-MAIL for email prioritization.
C-MAIL seamlessly integrates with email software (MS Outlook) to dynamically prioritize email according to recipient’s priorities and present important email first in an user-friendly view within Outlook. The product automatically learn from the user’s clicking behavior, past email history and customizable according to organization business rules. No complex rules and filters are needed and very little training is needed for a user to get started.