E-mail, as much as we love to hate it, is not the problem.

There’s an assumption among Web 2.0 evangelists and mass collaborationists 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 that e-mail is more a symptom, not a root cause. It’s often said that the challenges associated with enterprise collaboration are 90% cultural and only 10% technology-related. Is e-mail really the problem, or is it the nature of work? Giving up e-mail sounds fine and good, but it doesn’t remove the number of discrete tasks you have to complete. The real problem is the workflow model for enterprise collaboration.

This methodology is by no means scientific, but I’ve analyzed my own e-mail as a test case (I would encourage everyone to do the same). To provide some context; I work within a relatively small team of about 20 people and we are a very collaborative group. For the majority of people in the office, e-mail is the primary means of electronic communication. We also rely on phone and face-to-face communication, but in terms of sending documents and assigning tasks, e-mail is used in most cases.

Looking at an average week, I received a total of 214 e-mails over a seven day period (I don’t use e-mail for RSS feeds or wiki updates, otherwise I’m sure the number would have been much higher). Of the 214, fully 91 were immediately deleted because they were spam, FYIs, or ‘thanks’ (minimal time was spent in this culling exercise). That leaves about 123 in my inbox, or about 23 per day that don’t get deleted right away (only 7 came in over the weekend). Of these 123 relevant messages, there were:

• 29 tasks that fall outside my “normal” workflow.
• 14 tasks which take an hour or more to complete; 3 of which were delegated to others.
• 24 e-mails related to scheduling meetings/calls.
• 56 e-mails where I am the primary or only recipient.

I think the strongest underlying message that I can draw from this is that collaborative work, by its very nature, creates a significant number of tasks that are above and beyond regularly assigned work. This generally includes things like: providing feedback to others; reviewing documents and presentations; joining meetings, conversations, and online discussions; documenting best practices; and identifying new problems and solving them on an ad hoc basis. E-mail often gets blamed for all of this “extra work,” but the reality is, these tasks and activities won’t go away simply by switching to other technologies like wikis, IM, or intranets. Moreover, these tasks often result in new value for the enterprise and need to be recognized as “important work” not “extra work.”

Part I, Part II, Part III