Email has moved from being the internet’s first killer app to being a productivity killer. You can make news by claiming to hate it, ban it or kill it. But the problem with email is not the technology – we’re simply using it to do too many things.
Banning the inbox
French technology firm Atos recently announced an 18-month plan to ban email. CEO Thierry Breton claims only 10% of daily emails are useful and 18% are spam.
Atos will move the internal communications of its 74,000 employees from email to alternatives ranging from real-time messaging to a Facebook-style news feed. A spokesperson for the firm said internal mail has already been reduced by 20%.
The problem of overloaded inboxes is certainly acute; it stems from two central issues:
- There is a disjunct between employees' “need to know” information and the technical ease of replicating and forwarding that information.
- There is a tension between colleagues “being on the same page” and technical systems that are appropriate for enabling this.
These problems have led to email becoming the one-stop-shop for both tasks, while acting as long-term storage for all potentially relevant information. Inboxes can fill up with 20 emails just from arranging one group meeting; or slightly different versions of files being sent and re-sent; or CC lists and mailing list subscriptions.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the problem of commercial and personal spam.
So has Atos hit on a viable solution?
Bit literacy
Tech writer Mark Hurst, author of Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, would say no.
Hurst points out that the Atos announcement follows an increasing trend of radically condemning email that has sprung up over the last few years.
In 2008, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington declared email was crisis. Hurst cuttingly responded to this with the argument that a geek who can’t use email hasn’t thought through how it fits into the daily workflow.
Earlier this year, UNC Chapel Hill Professor Paul Jones “quit” email, instead offering students the opportunity to contact him via 12 alternative services. Hurst criticised Jones for replacing one service with a random collection of alternatives with different capabilities.
Why does Hurst love email so much? He proposes the technology itself is not the problem. Rather, he claims, individuals and institutions lack “bit literacy”. Bit literacy extends older concepts of “computer literacy” to include understandings of internet sharing technologies, of which workflows are a part.
Hurst’s strategy for inbox management proposes that the link between email and work should be on work as action not work as sorting information. As he says: “separate your to-dos from the rest of your emails, so that you can work from a to-do list, rather than an inbox.” This strategy has the advantage of being very simple and still allowing people to use email as their single point of contact.
Fitting technology to the task
The social aspect of email is still only part of the problem. The fast pace of technology development also means technologies can be better fitted to work tasks to which email is ill-suited.
Across all technologies, one fundamental issue that needs to be better addressed is improved search capability. The inability to search policies, documents, forms, calendars and so on is a primary reason why CC lists and other forms of replicated sending clutter up email inboxes. This process, known as federated searching, is difficult, of course, but the benefits would be far-reaching.
After better search facilities, cloud-based document creation and storage is the next most likely technology that could help us limit email volume.
Cloud-based document creation allows users to work on one document that tracks revisions rather than using individual copies of documents with differences that need to be constantly reconciled by emailing around the latest draft.
Instant messaging and micro-blogging platforms such as Yammer could also reduce internal email. Their quasi-synchronous nature promotes decision making in the moment rather than delay. Character limits (if they exist) reduce messages to the bare bones and promote telephone or face-to-face interaction for more detailed issues.
The ability to filter and block certain forms of messages or people also reduces the amount of material that needs to be skimmed for relevance.
These technologies, and those yet to be imagined, hold the promise of better suiting technology to work (and social) needs. That being said, adoption is tricky to predict. The Australian-developed Google Wave held the promise of integrated, searchable, collaboration platform that merged instant messaging, status, email, document and image sharing (among other things).
But its cluttered interface led to poor take-up that resulted in its demise last year. Google Wave was designed to be the integrated single point of content that email could not deliver, but that “all-in-one” aspect may well have been part of the problem.
Discrete applications that do their task well, coupled with improved search functions, could be a better long-term solution. And that may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.
The rise of open document formats such as XML, common standards for meta-data and common logins may well lead to a better future. That might sound complex, but think about what’s in your inbox now … isn’t it time to try something new?
What are your thoughts on the possible demise of email? Post your comments below.
Stephen Prowse
CEO at Wound CRC
Replacing email with another technology makes no sense unless it offers advantages. It would seem that this is about the management of email rather than the technology itself.
rob alan
IT Tech
Cloud is just a rename for cluster, nothing new there. Email is what it is, a communication tool. Security, privacy not guaranteed.
If there is a tend worth noting I think it be the moving away from insecure online models. The rise of VPN industry and P2P high encryption social media models becoming more common show privacy is becoming profitable.
Wally Week
Bicycle Engineer
I must be doing something wrong because I receive about 10 email messages per day in my work address. Perhaps 2 or 3 are direct messages from colleagues while the others belong to work mailing lists. I hardly see this as an overload. I do not really understand what people are doing to receive such an amount that they cannot handle. Perhaps they should unsubscribe from a few mailing lists or reduce the number of commitments?
Dan Buzzard
Researcher / Technologist
The possible demise of email?
I've seen people proclaim 'email is dead' on a regular basis over the past 12-13 years. Yet no alternative to email has ever emerged, possibly because email already does what it needs to.
The problem lies in the users who don't know how to organise themselves. People who are disorganised with their inbox aren't likely to change. Email is perhaps the greatest communication tool available because it allows me to organise everything, and keep records of correspondents that can be archived for future reference.
People who send lolcats via email will continue post them no matter what medium you use. At least Moron Mail can be filtered and ignored.
unifiedinbox.com
logged in via Twitter
We don't think email will ever be dead. Is radio dead? Is TV dead? Are good old fashioned letters dead? Well, yeah, kind of but still - they are around. The truth is that human beings have always preferred one way to communicate over another at given times that reflect the zeitgeist. Society develops - a new communication channel emerges. The only real solution to the problem of overload is not by banning emails, but by creating
a) better systems to manage them all in one singular interface and by
b) educating people how to communicate more effectively within such environments
We're happy to give out free trials for http://unifiedinbox.com for whoever wants to give it a go and give us feedback along these lines.
Marc Powell
logged in via Twitter
A thought provoking article - thank you.
Email overload is created often by human behaviour surrounding email use as much as by the technology itself.
As an email etiquette and email management trainer for the past 12 years, I have always advised against defaulting to email for all professional communication.
We need to get smart about the technology we have and use it to enhance our working lives - not be dictated by it.
Emailogic.com offer professional email etiquette and management training to small or large groups both internationally and in the UK. using a combination of seminars. webinars or elearning .We consistently save the people we train 17 days per year on the time they spend handling email overload.