As someone deep in the cursed land of 'but I sent you an email about it', this post struck a real chord with me:
'Every so often I run across a historic quote that reminds me how little we've advanced. Here's a good one I just found, from Jakob Nielsen back in 2000. (Special thanks to Kishore Balakrishnan for pointing me to this gem):
"In the long term, we need to remove everything from email that is not in the nature of personal correspondence."
Nielsen had it right. In the long run, email should only be used for personal correspondence. Group emails and reply to all are annoying and inefficient practices. And we have better tools in the form of wikis, blogs, threaded discussion boards, etc.
But is your in-box shrinking? Probably not. Consider these stats and projections from the Radicati Group cited in a Wall Street Journal article of 11/27/07
Average number of corporate emails sent and received per person, per day:
2007: 142
2008: 156
2009: 177
2010: 199
2011: 228
Percent of work day spent managing email for the average corporate email user:
2003: 17%
2006: 26%
2009: 41%
So what happened? Have we not yet reached the "long run", or did something go wrong somewhere along the line?
For me the bastard of corporate email is when it is used a) ass-covering so you can say that you've 'done' something N.B. Email is not doing something b) to dump documents c) to not have a conversation (especially tricky ones). Email is work itself. The new bain of my personal email life are my parents. They both fwd me more fwds than I know what do with replete with kittens, virus warnings, awful gender-based jokes and bon mots plus the odd rascist/bigoted American number. Sigh.
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