Case in point: I can leave my desk to attend a meeting for 45 minutes, and come back with nearly 100 emails in my inbox. While this is a bit extreme, it just shows how email can take up a large chunk of your day.
I recently stumbled on an article with a comment that caught my eye: "Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time-killer in the modern workplace."
According to the same article, "The average business user wades through 114 emails a day, which works out to 41,610 messages a year (or one email every 12.6 minutes of your life)."
So what if we got rid of e-mail in the workplace? We would certainly free up more time to work on important objectives like business development, employee relations, etc. But how would we communicate without email?
In 2011, the CEO of a large, multinational French IT company banned email in his organization, and although it was met with much criticism, his new policy decreased message volume by 20 percent, which freed up some time for the employees.
The author of this article suggests creating more of a social conversation in your organization, and moving away from traditional email. His suggestion: "Build an online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be broadcast--with a click--to the world. 'Conversations' isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And it’s worked for us and 5 million clients."
While I am not sure I agree completely with his suggestions, I do think he has a point. There must be a way we can eliminate the black hole that is our inbox, and come up with a faster, more efficient way of communicating.
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