I caught the BBC’s article on email overload this morning. The article points out that two million e-mails are sent every minute in the UK. That is almost three billion each day.
But what is the real cost of this information overload, they ask? Apparently one UK-based firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.
Everyone knows it’s a problem. Everyone hates trying to filter through hundreds of emails a day. So what to do?
Lots of organizations are now considering email-free days, as the article points out (and we talked about here). We’ve tried to encourage our clients to adopt social media tools as an alternative to email, but the culture of email is so deeply ingrained that it will take most organizations years to convince their employees to adopt wikis in a bid to thwart occupational spam. So perhaps more draconian measures are warranted.
There was a fairly radical suggestion posed at our Government 2.0 conference in Washington on Wednesday. New Paradigm colleague Nick Bontis suggested a one-cent tax on every email sent. For a variety of reasons, I’m sure its totally unworkable. The financial and political costs of collecting the tax, for example, could very well exceed the revenue it generates. Or would it? The UK government would stand to gain about £3 million in tax revenue every day, which it could redirect to good causes like closing the digital divide and increasing literacy rates.
Anyways, I’d like to hear your proposals for getting out of email jail.
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Getting out of email jail? My first step would be:
Empower employees and community members to be able to respond more quickly and solve more problems without resorting to emailing an anonymous inbox somewhere and waiting weeks for a response.
In my daily routine I use email, instant messaging, twitter, telephone and face-to-face conversations depending on what is most appropriate, and it works incredibly well.
And a change will come, as I’ve recently seen research showing the use of social networks etc is actually eating into the use of email by teenagers.
An email tax is unworkable, and takes away from the reason people have embraced email/social communication etc. It’s quick, easy and free at a time when the rising cost of living makes everything prohibitively expensive. The only problem is reminding people that although email is quick, easy and free, it’s not a suitable solution for everything.
Comment by Dan Thornton - March 7, 2008 11:25 am
I follow the Getting Things Done principles and Merlin Man’s ‘Inbox Zero’. Works wonderfully for me. For a more radical approach also follow Luis Suarez’s venture to stop using email. You can read more on his blog. I blogged about it too.
Comment by Samuel Driessen - March 7, 2008 3:18 pm
I used to get hundreds, now probably ten a day. I simply stopped sending so much email. I asked people not to CC me and directed all such mail to deleted items automatically, with a notice to the sender.
I find the size of your inbox is proportional to that of your sent items.
Comment by Tim - March 7, 2008 4:26 pm
Email clients need to get smarter too. Where’s the microformats for GTD items, for example? After all the innovation at the launch of gmail how come it hasn’t evolved into a contact management system that allows me to tag people I email, records stats and reminds me to contact them an appropriate number of times?
Email is a write-once medium. Once hit send does the content I’m no longer able to edit. Write-once doesn’t accommodate a world of continuous changes. Email simply defies wikinomics.
- Martin Cleaver, Blended Perspectives.
Comment by Martin Cleaver - March 25, 2008 5:27 pm
[...] that the real problem with knowledge work is e-mail (e.g. see our own blog here and here). I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced [...]
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