We all did.
“I’ll just send him/her a quick e-mail .”
“Can you send that over in an e-mail?”
E-mail is very convenient. It’s simple, fast and quicker than picking up the phone. Unfortunately in most business settings, other than the phone, it is the only way people communicate.
This is a problem.
How many emails do you get a day? 100? 200? Sadly those numbers aren’t uncommon. Most of those emails had information that we did have to make available to the other person, but it didn’t have to go out in an e-mail. If companies used blogs, wiki’s and forums as a part of their intranets I’m willing to bet that 3/4 of the internal emails we send could be eliminated.
The e-mail channel is clogged because it is the only electronic channel we have.
E-mail sucks for collaboration. More on that later.
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Wow, ain’t this the truth!
I’ve written about this on a couple of occasions, such as How Multi-Tasking and E-mail Waste Time (which caused a wee bit of a flurry to be stirred up in some parts of the blogosphere), and most recently I’ve had it with e-mail only customer service, which has gotten a fair share of attention, as well.
Another problem: As much as it seems to be, email technology is still not as reliable as we’d like it to be. Just today I rec’d a phone call from an out-of-state company that wanted to hire me for some train the trainer classes. He’d tried emailing me twice, but both of his efforts bounced back to him.
Thankfully (my pocketbook thanks him, too), he had enough range of motion in his arms to be able to pick up the phone and call me!
I’ve been advocating to just about all my clients to create wiki/blogs for their various projects. Some are doing it, some aren’t. But I certainly agree, Tac … it’s the clearest channel open for that kind of work –and it can’t get spammed!!!
- Dan B.
Workplace Excellence blog
Dan,
Blogs are such an amazingly flexible application I love to see people using them for purposes other than blatant self promotion (although I obviously love that use as well). Blogs are just one possible channel. The more channels we have (within reason) the better each channel becomes for their specific purposes.
Today (May 14), I got an e-mail from a vendor asking me to provide him with some specs so that he could provide this solution to us. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.
So he replies to me with a long thread between he and someone else at our firm, where apparently I was tasked with a project in a May 3 e-mail. I never saw the e-mail because it was of course buried in 300 other e-mails I get every day.
My project’s deadline was May 11 - three days ago. Guess I better get started. Of course - maybe if this project REALLY needed doing, it should have been tasked in another way . . .