As I’m writing this, the fourth most-blogged article from the New York Times website is "Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast," which appeared on June 14. It describes how knowledge workers at many high-tech firms feel as if they’re drowning in e-mail, and how bad habits and etiquette (like reflexively using the ‘reply to all’ option) contribute to the situation. The flood of e-mail has become such a concern that a working group called the Information Overload Research Group has been formed; members include Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel.
E-mail is clearly ‘in the flow‘ for most modern knowledge workers. For many of them, it seems, it in fact is the flow. But so what? Why is a lot of e-mail bad? If consequential things happen frequently and a knowledge worker needs to be aware of them in order to do her job, isn’t e-mail as good a vehicle as any to communicate these important developments?
According to the Times article, the problem with that argument is that a lot of e-mails actually aren’t very important. Research by Basex, a company that works at "the intersection of content, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within the enterprise," indicates that 28% of an info-workers day is spent on "interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages" and on recovering from these interruptions.
The problem with using e-mail for all communications is that it gets used for, well, all communications, even those that aren’t time-critical, personal, private, or salient. It also gets used to coordinate the multi-person creation of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, a task at which it’s abysmal. I often ask audiences how many people execute multi-person collaborations by attaching the (hopefully) most recent version of a file to a group e-mail again and again. Most hands go up. I then ask how many people are happy with this mode of collaboration; very few hands remain in the air.
The principal solutions proposed by the Times article are to shut off or otherwise walk away from email for some portion of the workday, and to rely more on face-to-face interactions. These are surely both good and perhaps even necessary ideas. Many of the writers I know go offline when they have to get serious work done (one of my colleagues goes so far as to unplug his wireless router when he needs to concentrate). Short email sabbaticals and more actual human contact are probably valuable for today’s deluged knowledge workers.
And so are Enterprise 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, and social networking software, for several reasons. First, wikis and other group-level editing tools like Zoho, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and SocialCalc can be used to collaboratively build something without having to email attachments around to everyone. As this diagram popularized by Chris Rasmussen shows, working this way can save iterations, streamline work, and leave people happier in addition to reducing email volume.
Second, E2.0 tools are good ones for project management; they can be used to track status and progress on action items, highlight new developments, and generally keep everyone on the same page. This only works, though, if everyone on the project agrees to use the 2.0 project management tools; if the boss still wants everything emailed to her and continues to use email for her updates, Enterprise 2.0 becomes above the flow rather than in it, and so likely increases interruptions rather than decreasing them.
Finally, social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter let people tell their far-flung friends and colleagues what they’re up to without sending a single email, and also let them keep on top of their networks without opening the Inbox. These tools have a very interesting property; they let us dip into the stream of friends’ updates when it’s convenient for us, not when it’s convenient for the updater (as would be the case with email). These updates tend to be less time-critical and less private, and so don’t really belong in our personal Inboxes. Instead, they float by in an ether that we can jump into whenever we like. Leisa Reichelt calls this ability to dip at will into the lives of our friends and/or the workstreams of our colleagues ‘ambient intimacy,’ which I think is a lovely phrase.
The active blogger and social media user Luis Suarez recently launched an interesting experiment: he gave up on work e-mail. As he describes it, he "created a post in my internal blog where I was mentioning that from that day onwards I would not be answering any e-mails, nor write any e-mails myself either, but instead I would make the most out of social software tools and social computing, in general, to get in touch with other knowledge workers and collaborate further sharing and exchanging our knowledge over there." Suarez still uses e-mail for private communications where sensitive information is exchanged, but is trying hard to avoid e-mail otherwise. Initial results, he says, are that his emails have dropped off by as much as a factor of five (his blog posts to date on this experiment are here and here.).
I’d love to hear others’ experiences in this area. Are you drowning in e-mail? Or have you found ways to staunch the flow? Are Enterprise 2.0 technologies helping at all? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
I think email is a problem if you let it, the same way everyday stress and anxiety come in, if you let’em. I seem to have this relief valve, which when applied to email, seems to look out for patterns, and reduce the inflow of emails: unsubscribe to old(er) newsletters, remove unwanted email notifications, ask people to check my blog, wiki, etc.
Since the acceleration of the electronic revolution, people seems to be looking for balance and I see this quest for less email camped in the same reality. But I’m not an executive, I’m an IT specialist, and so, I’d say that most of the email I get I actually need to receive. And don’t complain about it.
From my observations, it seems there are two types of people complaining about too much email: company executives and/or mid-management (cuz many feel the need to cc/bcc), and individuals (where spam is really the issue).
And before you think I’m all news-agy and stuff, I’m a colleague of Luis at IBM and a proponent of social software within IBM. But I help educate IBMers to choose ‘the right tool for the right job’: email for recipient-specific info and social software for topic-specific messages or task-oriented requirements.
I’d say we need to be careful not to act as and echo-chamber to the problems of a few and generalize to the whole IT population.
A couple of other reasons for the email onslaught…
- There is a certain “CYA” component when it comes to email. With the advent of these tools, I think that management’s tolerance for not being “in the loop” when something significant happens is far less. Almost all employees have been reprimanded in this way at one time or another, so employees use email as a shield to protect themselves, even though 99% of the email he/she sends is unnecessary. The problem is that you have no idea what the 1% that is important really is.
- Google Docs is not easy to use. At least 9 months ago. Great idea, bad execution. But I agree, email is miserable in this regard.
- Not try to be too negative, but there is a “laziness” aspect to facebook and other technologies. With “facebook”, you can keep in touch with others who you count as “friends”, but not necessarily those you would call on the phone on a regular basis. Even though internally you admit that you should call them to chat. Transpose this to email. There are those who I would rather email than personally talk to. It may be that I don’t necessarily like talking that person, he/she may be long-winded or may just be an uncomfortable conversationalist. Is this lazy and kinda spineless on my part? Yeah. But when it comes to work, you just want to get the message across, sometimes I really don’t care about “building character”, thus I shoot emails.
Professor McAfee,
The non-profit I volunteer at, started to use wikis for collaboration and google sites for issue tracking. One issue we are seeing is that if there is no email notifications from these systems, people lose track of their action items and important discussions lose sight. If we enable email notifications, we have the same problem of bloated inboxes that we had without these tools.
So what we have found out is that if there are no email notifications, wikis go ignored……..
Any suggestions on how to combat this?
As a technologist and fellow e-mail hater, I long for the day when my inbox will contain only two things:
1) Private, personal communications from people I know and trust and
2) Notifications alerting me to check the social sites that I frequent (e.g. blog xyz has a follow-up comment, person abc responded to your forum post or the wiki page you authored has been changed by abc).
Until then, I’ll continue to suffer from e-mail overload and poor collaboration via e-mail. In the past two months, I’ve sent for-your-eyes-only e-mails that have been inappropriately forwarded, I’ve had people surreptitiously add (or remove) people from the CC line, and of course, I’ve deleted thousands of irrelevant spam messages.
The saddest part about the situation with e-mail is that, over the past 20 years, we’ve dug ourselves into a hole so deep that we can’t even see the light of day any more. But yet most of us are happy living in this subterranean dwelling.
Here’s an example: we recently launched a social site for a conference of around 100 people taking place in August. We used every social channel available to broadcast the launch: we updated the conference web site, we updated their blog and my blog (both of which are distributed through RSS), we updated Facebook statuses, added posted items to Facebook and broadcast several Twitter messages. The result? We have fewer than 10 registered users.
In a couple of days, we plan (unfortunately) to send a blast e-mail to all the conference registrants. I’m expecting that (assuming we send the e-mail on Tuesday) by Friday, we’ll have over 100 new sign ups. (I’ll post the results of my little experiment on my blog, if anyone’s interested. Perhaps I should e-mail them out instead, if I really want people to see them.)
What does this mean? A lot of leading technologists have denounced e-mail. However, it’s still the best way to reach people because, despite all of its deficiencies, it remains the only technology that *everyone uses all day, every day.* Despite the overwhelming popularity of social sites like Facebook and Twitter, very few people can make a similar claim about them.
I’m drowning in email, email from colleagues and clients, from Business Social Networks, Personal Social Networks, newsletters, (job) offers, all kinds of alerts etc… I’m now telling and educating my colleagues to use Instant Messaging or to use Twitter, to use a wiki and to use RSS for all kind of things. The problem is, email is a push medium (and a formal accepted medium of communication). Other tools and technologies are all pull based. It’s hard to convince my colleagues and to change this behavior because people are used to email as the primary online communication platform. On the other hand it’s even harder to convince clients to reduce email. Portals, collaboration tools and technologies, they all need to have a low entry and need to be fast. You told us about email 9times problem, besides that email is the one source where we gather all our information of all those networks, tools and technologies. People are in different stages of the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 process, sometimes they choose their own toolset expecting others to use this particular toolset. People are constantly jumping in and outside the firewall search for tools which suits there needs, are sharing this in their particular group hoping someone else adopts this. It’s great to see Luis Suarez is succesfull in his mission, email dropped with factor 5. I tried several plugins in my email client Outlook with 2 goals in mind, managing the e-mail flood and trying to make the e-mail client the single point of communication. I failed.
RSS is one part of the solution, management support for choosing the RIGHT communication and collaboration tools is another. People helping (evangelists) is another part of being successful. And the last? We need to get rid of our behavior when it’s about email. (RSS introduces in my opinion another problem, information overload, the same problem as the e-mail drowning problem)
Andrew,
Great topic. I recently wrote a blog titled “The Killer App That is Killing Us” (http://groupswim.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/the-killer-app-that-is-killing-us/) on this very topic. Email is clearly good for some things and shouldn’t be thrown out entirely. Unfortunately, it is used for all things in most places which is the problem.
At GroupSwim, we use our own product to collaborate for our company. We use a GroupSwim site to house all discussions, documents and wikis we use to operate our business. For example, we have sections in our site dedicated to:
- Application Management and Integration
- Business Planning and Strategy
- Competitors
- Customers
- Meeting Agendas and Notes
- General Discussion
- Investors
- Product Requirements
- Production, Performance, Scalability and Hardware
- Sales Materials
- User Experience and Design
- Web Layer and Technology
In our case, if have anything to share with colleagues, we put it into GroupSwim in the appropriate group versus sending an email. We enjoy significant benefits in capturing information in context and being able to find anything in moments.
I think email is a fine tool when used appropriately, but I do agree that there are better tools to support collaboration. It is ironic however that most, if not all, the collaboration software tools depend on much maligned email to notify team members about updates and prod them to participate.
I suspect that an element of accountability, an email addressed to a person often requires some action, is what irritates many people. Office politics often employs emails as a proof of action or failure to act.
While on the subject of email interruptions, it has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with poor time management skills IMHO. I can’t imagine anything more interrupting than Twitter, but a lot of people love it. The same people who complain about email.
Andrew,Â
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Managed RSS is a simple and effective approach to cutting email overload. Managed RSS provides a single XML syndication framework for the entire organization. A managed RSS system provides the tools to move content onto publish-subscribe channels and away from email on an enterprise wide basis.Â
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Using managed RSS in an enterprise Publish-Subscribe network moves organizations away from the “hunting and gathering” behavior mentioned in the article to a more agrarian-like approach to information management. These networks reduce the burden on email as the backbone of corporate information flow and in the process reorient email to its highest and best use.
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In the interest of transparency I am associated with Attensa an enterprise RSS solutions vendor. Our experience working with large companies shows these publish-subscribe networks are far more effective than relying on individuals to improve their “email etiquette” or restricting email without providing an appropriate alternative.Â
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In a publish-subscribe network, most one-to-many communications and collaborative transactions can be organized into channels. Workflows and alerts can be managed very effectively outside of email. Information flowing from feed enabled portals, both traditional and new community portal forms such as blogs and wiki’s, can be easily monitored because relevant new information is intelligently distributed to interested subscribers as soon as it is published.
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The user experience is also flexible and superior to email. Information arrives organized and in context. Users can choose how, when and where they wish to access and consume RSS. Managed RSS platforms provide synchronization and common user experience across the various platforms and devices (web, desktop and mobile). Organizations deploying RSS as core strategy are taking an important step toward abstracting the information being distributed from the device upon which it must be consumed. This opens a new set of opportunities to intelligently route and consume information based on user, context and other factors. Â
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A managed RSS framework also improves the usability of the new crop of collaborative communication tools such as blogs, wiki’s and community portals. Without tools to intelligently route and manage the information that these social applications generate organizations must examine whether they are making the problem better or worse.  We use the term “social scaling” to describe this phenomenon.  Â
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Within these emerging models direct user-publishing is also a powerful concept.  Common topics of interaction can be RSS based channels and members of groups can publish directly to those channels. These channels can either be feeds themselves residing only on the RSS infrastructure or they can be destinations such as blogs, wiki’s or community portals.  As a result the information is contextual, easy to consume and collaborate around.Â
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As an example, within our own environment I was able to repost your abstract to our collaboration portal with two clicks and in seconds it was syndicated across our organization through the RSS feed generated by that portal – no email involved.
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Examples of managed publish-subscribe networks within organizations are showing great promise to reduce our reliance on email and improve the efficiency of collaborative transactions.  We will start posting some of these cases at  www.attensa.com.
The rise of applications like Facebook, Twitter surely indicate that people are fed up with emails. As we move along, and these applications get better integrated with Mobiles, emails will start finding their place in rest.
This is my personal opinion.
Hi Andrew,
thats an interesting follow up to our conversation we had two weeks ago, about how ubiquitous information will change management behaviour and/or leadership.
I found, that it is sometimes quite difficult to convince people to use a new method. Email is still the standard and prefered tool, despite the fact, that it is sometimes annoying.
But if I understand you right, the information flow changes its direction, from push to pull.
But I am rather sceptical, that the information overflow will decrease. Now you have all the useless and valuable information in you mailbox.
But to stay connected to the new web 2.0 information flow you have to sign up to many rss-feeds. And again you will have to scroll through loads of uninteresting and interesting data.
But now much more diversified between several tools.
I work for a large organization, and we’re all drowning. When returning from a week off, one coworker had 1000 unread messages. It passed being ridiculous a long time ago.
Here, as with most other organizations, the real barriers to change seem to be our old friends: fear and inertia. One of the problems is so many organizational decision-makers entered the business world in the 1970s and 1980s.
Back then, work was much more adversarial than it is today. Being a jerk was a good way to protect your turf and get ahead. Collaboration meant allowing yourself to be vulnerable with a potential adversary.
Thankfully, we’re no longer in the Dark Ages, but many mid- and upper-level managers still feel this way about collaboration and openness. That is, one’s organizational power is expressed as control. Giving up control means giving up power.
We have a small Wiki that’s been growing in size and popularity over the past two years. Now that it’s becoming popular (and therefore better and more useful), management is considering locking it down to “prevent vandalism”.
More academic research is needed in this area to demonstrate to management the value of letting go.
Going voluntarily analog these days provides that much needed break for being so wired to the PC and email is just but one of the many applications that can be so interruptive.
Fortunately, there are lots of collaboration tools existing which could take the load off and most are web hosted. May I add Morph helpME to the mix and see your project go live on a site upon every iteration.
Best.
alain
“Second, E2.0 tools are good ones for project management; they can be used to track status and progress on action items, highlight new developments, and generally keep everyone on the same page. This only works, though, if everyone on the project agrees to use the 2.0 project management tools; if the boss still wants everything emailed to her and continues to use email for her updates, Enterprise 2.0 becomes above the flow rather than in it, and so likely increases interruptions rather than decreasing them. ”
I agree with this. I’ve been trying to get a project team to use E2.0 tools recently. It’s been harder work than I expected. We’ve been using Google docs to hold project documentation. This includes a spreadsheet that is the project plan. I had to switch to Zoho for the plan, because it became too big to upload to Google Docs. So that made 2 places to look, and 2 applications to learn. I thought both Google Docs and Zoho would be ‘no-brainers’ to get the hang of, but some people found it difficult. And we’ve had glitches, both human (eg my forgetting to give the right people access to a document) and technical (a bug in Google preventing editing of access permissions).
However, despite all these issues I think we’ve begun to see some benefits, and no-one has refused to play ball out of our small team of half a dozen or so. It’s also been interesting that, some sensitive customer data apart (which was kept off the system) there has not been too much concern about putting the project data onto third party servers.
Yes, my work is internet related and I literally have received hundreds of emails per day. Many of them are spam and that is where there is tremendous amounts of time being wasted. Even some of the good email spam prevention programs don’t always do the trick.
I agree, email management has been a big problem for me. Web 2.0 applications are good, but they sound out a lot of unimportnat emails by default usually as well.
One thing I’ve done that has helped with time management was to turn off “auto send / receive” in Outlook. Now I only check emails when I have time. This has made my day much more productive.
That is why I personally limit my email viewing to three times a day. I was wasting to much time checking emails and reading pointless junk each day.
Email IMHO is the bane of modern society communication. It does not express emotions and miscommunication is common between correspondents. The fast pace of emails results in a type of 3rd party mentality, in that those involved tends to behave as a 3rd virtual self which can more often than not be far more aggressive than what they normally are in real life.
I am still involved in my Internet businesses, but the day I quit Internet businesses is the day I sworn off emails. I had my fair share of misunderstandings with others when corresponding through emails. Many a times, those sending emails do not realize what they are actually conveying and that is dangerous. Hopefully better ways of communications will overtake email as the chief form of correspondence.
All the above are not taking into account the sheer number of viruses and spams that was filtered off my email accounts and those that managed to sneak through. An analyst of mine estimated that if I do not leave any filter on, 6 out of 7 of my emails are spams or viruses.
Managed RSS is a simple and effective approach to cutting email overload. Managed RSS provides a single XML syndication framework for the entire organization. A managed RSS system provides the tools to move content onto publish-subscribe channels and away from email on an enterprise wide basis.
Although, I think every social network should have a lightweight App to display alerts like Messenger instead of keep sending emails for every minor notifications.
The rise of applications like Facebook, Twitter surely indicate that people are fed up with emails. As we move along, and these applications get better integrated with Mobiles, emails will start finding their place in rest.
This is my personal opinion.
Many of us might have witnessed the explosive growth of electronic and communications technologies which took place since the 1980s. It was not only limited to the American continent but spread worldwide as well. Throughout those two decades, many high tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, IBM etc switched gears to create affordable computers, Internet applications, cell phones, and a dozen other electronics/multimedia based products for use in the office and at home.
Information technologies, however, made their presence felt on the productivity of businesses worldwide. Every industry starting from manufacturing and ending at retail benefited from these technology advances. There’s no doubt that Internet applications have made things much simpler for everyone. Hi-tech solutions are growing at an ever faster rate. It is hard to imagine were we will be in 10 years.
I agree, so much of my time is wasted on junk email even though my company spends way more than they should for supposed spam blockers.
“Finally, social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter let people tell their far-flung friends and colleagues what they’re up to without sending a single email, and also let them keep on top of their networks without opening the Inbox. These tools have a very interesting property; they let us dip into the stream of friends’ updates when it’s convenient for us, not when it’s convenient for the updater (as would be the case with email). These updates tend to be less time-critical and less private, and so don’t really belong in our personal Inboxes. Instead, they float by in an ether that we can jump into whenever we like. Leisa Reichelt calls this ability to dip at will into the lives of our friends and/or the workstreams of our colleagues ‘ambient intimacy,’ which I think is a lovely phrase.”
Ambient intimacy is a lovely phrase, but most of the time it is “noisy annoyance” as we are updated with useless information that we could care less about. I get tired of people chronically updating us to the mundanity of their lives!
Emails are great. They are needed in the business world. I do hate all of the spam but emails have cut down on a lot of phone calls. 15 emails can be answered faster then 15 phone calls. I also love the Facebook and Twitter because it has eliminated most of all the emails from family and friends. (except the ones that just have to send jokes, lots of jokes) All in all it is great!
Are you familiar with Tim Ferris at all? Like you mentioned in this article he advocates not being connected to your email all day. In fact, he recommends that you only look at your email twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. That way the rest of the day will not be distracted by sifting through your emails!
Thanks for your article!
Thanks for your article!