Everyone is drowning in email. A lot of this is the result of people not using the medium effectively. The email charter has the most concise definition of the problem I’ve seen, along with a set of very actionable rules for fixing it:
The relentless growth of in-box overload is being driven by a surprising fact:
The average time taken to respond to an email is greater, in aggregate, than the time it took to create.…
Now consider that the amount of time people are spending on line is increasing. It is, after all, a seductive place to hang out. As social creatures, it’s the most natural thing in the world to want to use that time to reach out to others. What is more the range of ‘distractions’ online is growing every year. And it’s easy (and often wonderful) to share them with our friends and colleagues. Just copy a link, paste and send… and boom, the world’s cognitive capacity takes another hit!
The result of all this is a deadly upward spiral. Every hour you spend writing and sending email is probably consuming more than an hour of the combined attention of your various recipients. So without meaning to, we’re all creating an ever growing problem for each other.
