posted by Hanson Hosein
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot about how busy people are beginning to give up on e-mail, to the point of declaring “e-mail bankruptcy.” I’ve been on the verge of doing so myself, though I’ve done little to help my situation: with poor e-mail management skills, and a propensity to return e-mail quickly (the more you respond, the more you get).
So I liked reading about IBM’s “Social Computing Evangelist’s” approach to dropping e-mail altogether and relying more on social media tools.
While in New Orleans this past week wrapping up shooting of my documentary “Rising from Ruins,” I had very little time to attend to e-mail (despite being permanently attached to my Nokia E61i’s Blackberry service). But I was happy to let people know what I was doing on a regular basis via my Twitter feed through my phone, which also automatically updates my Facebook status, as well as the production blog for my film. I even tweeted while out on the Gulf Coast in a shrimping boat. I figured if anyone really needed to reach me, they’d do something very old school like pick up the phone. Or direct message me via Twitter…
Here’s my complete NOLA Twitter feed.
Email is overwhelming me. I currently have 96 emails sitting in my work inbox (and don’t ask about my Gmail account!) to read this morning (hello, Monday!). I have to make a conscious effort to stay on top of the flood and take a couple of hours outside of the office to intensely focus on clearing it out (too many phone calls and drop-ins to focus at work!). I’m trying to efficiently use ClearContext / FranklinCovey plug-ins to better filter and prioritize, but I’m not an inbox master yet.
But I don’t think email is going away in favor of social networks. There are too many benefits to email in general to dump it. Everyone has an email address, and you can use any app to contact them (unlike IM and SocNets). There is the need for written records, from a business perspective.
We should enforce email etiquette: proper use of To: vs Cc: fields, limiting addressees to those crucial to the conversation, judicious use of Reply vs Reply All. Things of this nature could help ease some of the volume. Getting rid of Blackberries might help, too – if you had to log in to a computer to read / send email, you’d be a lot more conscious of what you’re sending.
Agree with Jeremy. Use the right tool for the job…. sometimes, it’s email. Sometimes, it’s a phone call. Sometimes, it’s a text/IM/twitter/Facebook/etc message. All can be one-to-one or one-to-many.