"Email is Dead"

That's the provocative title of a short article on Fast Company's site. Author Doug Beizer reports how three companies are dealing with the increasing volume, and decreasing effectiveness, of e-mail:

• Capital One is offering e-mail training, including such tactics as more informative subject lines. (We've written about that tactic here, here, and here.)
• Union Bank is replacing mass e-mailing with RSS feeds.
• Reuters is supplementing e-mail with instant messaging (IM).

What's your response, or your organization's response, to e-mail's decreasing effectiveness?

Comments

[John Whiteside]

My reaction is to question the idea that email is dead; the article doesn't make much of case (though it raises some interesting topics). Yes, email is becoming overwhelming for a lot of people. Yes, people need to learn to manage it better.

But the article conflates personal email with mass email, which is a big mistake (the mass mailings are in fact best replaced with things like RSS feeds). Reserving a conference room most places I've worked has been as simple as creating a meeting invitation (in your email client), searching the schedules of everyone there (all online) as well as the resources like rooms, and clicking send. If it's taking 7 or 8 emails it's because the organization has failed to simply make it mandatory that people use the tools in front of them.

(IM, by the way, doesn't tell you who's there; just whose computer is turned on.)

There's a lot being written lately about how manage email, much of it quite good; training in this area is a wise idea. But email is hardly dead. New rules are evolving, that's all.

Incidentally - there are a couple of things anybody can do to make it easier to manage. One, treat the inbox like a holding area and clear it every night; everything must be acting on, turned into a to-do, or filed away. Two, be careful with reply all; it would be great if email programs added a step to this process (like making you review a list of recipients) but one can do it oneself. Three, create rules to highlight priority items (from your boss, where you're the direct addressee and not cc'ed, etc.).

Finally, I found it hugely helpful to change the default mailbox polling (how often email is fetched to 30 or 60 minutes instead of 5 minutes). It reduced the interruption factor of getting email considerably.

[Brad Shorr]

For me email is an annoying but necessary evil. I promote feeds for my blog whenever I can, but few of my clients really understand RSS. Google Docs cuts down email considerably. Clients, collaborators and I can edit and discuss documents in process without all the back and forth emails.