Email is our work - communication with other humans is the task that still cannot be automated. That's why I am rather sceptical about the productivity boost of "no email days" introduced in some corporations. I suspect they just don't measure the right things.
All this does not mean that we should do all this human communication work in email - only that currently this is the tool most people use. Perhaps we could do this work in a bit more efficient way if we had a more complete toolbox.
3 comments:
I respectfully both agree and disagree. Communication with others is hugely important for many jobs. But e-mail tends to be a very poor way to do it.
Most people write poorly in e-mail. They don't organize their thoughts, so it can take several e-mail exchanges to clarify what's going on.
E-mail also arrives out of order, requiring the reader to switch contexts as they go through an inbox with possibly hundreds of messages. The chance that you'll get their concentrated attention for long enough to give real thought to your message is hit-or-miss.
At the end of the day, e-mail can be great for exchange of reference information. For building and maintaining relationships, however, I'd put in a vote for the phone.
Stever Robbins
host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast
Thanks for the comment. I must agree that I oversimplified everything in the post. My main point was that the communication work is real work - and that since we do less and less of other work then will do more and more of it. The fact that we do it now in email is just a coincidence in this reasoning.
Quite true... computers can't communicate in our place. There is, however, another thing they can't do, and that is engage in creative thinking; and creative thinking requires stretches of contiguous, uninterrupted time.
This is a key motivation to reduce email overload - because it is a constant source of distractions as the messages keep popping up.
Incidentally, the "no email day" experiment we've run at Intel is not about not doing email - it is about encouraging voice communication as a better alternative whenever possible, notably when the other person sits nearby. Nobody is disputing the value of email as a primary comm tool in other cases.
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