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USA Today misfires on e-mail overload
Here's an article I see every month or so: "E-mail overload is everywhere! Where oh where could our solution be? Oh, it's such an awful problem, too bad we have nothing but the following random tips and tricks..."
The latest version comes from USA Today, which suggests "e-mail free Friday," an answer to Casual Friday, and then goes on to suggest the self-defeating tactic of "e-mail bankruptcy." From the story:
Prominent techies are tackling the problem individually by declaring "e-mail bankruptcy" -- deleting or archiving an entire in-box and starting over.
As though prominent techies doing it makes it somehow less irresponsible.
And then this:
E-mail overload is caused by the sheer volume of messages zipping around the globe. Each day, about 39.7 billion person-to-person e-mails, 17.1 billion automated alerts, and 40.5 billion pieces of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) are sent worldwide ...
D'oh. That's a measurement of the problem, but not the cause. Incoming e-mail is a fact of life now; measuring it isn't going to point to a solution. The cause of the problem is simply that people don't know the skills of managing digital information.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I'm hopeful that future stories on e-mail overload will strike a more positive (and accurate) note: "This awful problem now has a solution - a new philosophy for dealing with always-on, always-chattering technology: it's a set of skills called 'bit literacy'..."
(tx, Mary)
Hi Mark -- From personal experience, it also seems that part of the problem is that employees aren't being trained on how to write efficient and purposeful emails. Email may have superseded phone calls in the workplace, but that's not an excuse for lazy communication skills. Whenever someone sends me an incoherent (Is this guy crazy? He's talking in circles!), vague (So...what was the question exactly?), or piecemeal (Is this the last piece? Is there more coming?) email, or blindly forwards an email chain without calling out what parts I'm supposed to pay attention to -- it almost always begets a string of additional emails to repair the communication breakdown. And most times, the sender is neither incoherent, vague, nor scattered in real life -- they communicate perfectly well over the phone or in person.
I'm a prominent techy. I prefer emails to telephone in that 1) I have a trail to refer back to and 2) you can't have a technical conversation, or a question and answer session with a person who thinks out loud.