We live in a hyper-connected world, yet part of the blowback is the excessive communication that occurs –I fear it will only get worse over time.
Today, I spoke to an Executive at medium sized corporation who confessed that she cannot keep up with her email inflow. She receives about 500 emails a day, and told me at the end of the day she sorts by sender. First from her CEO, then by the folks on her team directly reporting to her, and then whatever else she can get to.
Despite the many collaboration tools available to all of us, we use email for way too many tools (I’m guilty too) from: Status updates, document management, calendaring, collaboration, social networking, and even for ‘conversations’.
Part of the reason I blog is that I can get my message, thoughts and story out to thousands of people in just about twice the amount of time it takes to write an email. My colleagues follow me on twitter, and often know where I’m at, what I’m doing. Scoble publishes his calendar so those he needs to interview can help schedule. Yet despite these, I, my colleagues, and Scoble and you likely have more email than can be consumed.
Ironically, most of my social media peers and I still use email as one of the main ways to communicate back and forth to each other But even more, there are more inboxes to check, twitter, facebook, linkedin, I’m getting business messages from these tools and I’m sure you are too.
So what’s the solution? It’s going to be part process, and part tools. Some have committed to responding to emails only in five sentences or less, and new tools like Xobni are starting to appear (I’ve requested a beta account)
Questions for you
1) How is your email intake? Can you handle it all?
2) How do you make your communications more efficient?
3) We’re headed to a hyper-connected world with an increase in communication channels, how will you cope?
Update: I’m all for solutions, and have found that aside from the excellent comments below, that some suggest to only check email twice a day (11am and 4pm) and to set that as an expectation. Colleague Julie Katz has announced an upcoming strategic report to help marketers how to understand how to reach those that are consumed. Hopefully, this email service vendor ClearContext promises to help with the problems.
I only have emails in my inbox from May 11 and there’s over 2K. But I also manage emails from the corp website. If emails are longer than a paragraph i file in a “read later” folder. If it’s from sr. mgmt it’s read immediately. I eliminated IM to mitigate distractions.
Communicating effectively for me in a corp environment means collecting a list of “people to communicate with” at the start of the day and then getting up out of my desk and going to talk face-to-face. I also block out phone time on my calendar.
If I’m ever over-connected, I’ll just purge.
Hi
I guess the comments above have kind of put forth a lot of ideas… in short:
– one is more in cc..need to have email etiquettes strong..
even if loads of individual mails..my concern always has been what about the private self, the world outside.. its like all the people i know are glued to TV, radio or comp…they see the world, sky but on weekends, u r always connected thru phone, mobiles, can social network through twitter… but seriously isnt this a concern…
wat say u?
Mark Hurst has a recent post (and a book) about the topic of email overload.
http://goodexperience.com/2008/03/a-geek-who-cant-use-e.php
Personally I find the DEL key to be a really efficeint filter.
like most folks here I receive my fair share of email between work and personal it gets pretty crazy. However my issue with email is nobody really reads it. How many times have you had to send the same email about a project two, three and four times discussing the same points and topics because more than likely you have been filtered, deleted or worse you remain unread.