Is This a Way to Break the Email Overload Problem?
October 11th, 2007 (2:00pm) Judi Sohn 12 Comments
What’s next? Caffeine-free Tuesdays? Getting people to talk less with “Um”-free Wednesdays?
The Wall Street Journal reports on U.S. Cellular’s efforts to reduce email stress by declaring “no email Friday.”
A growing number of employers, including U.S. Cellular, Deloitte & Touche and Intel, are imposing or trying out “no email” Fridays or weekends. While the bans typically allow emailing clients and customers or responding to urgent matters, the normal flow of routine internal email is halted. Violators are hit with token fines, or just called out by the boss.
The limits aim to encourage more face-to-face and phone contact with customers and co-workers, raise productivity or just give employees a reprieve from the ever-rising email tide.
Is this a band-aid solution still looking for the problem?
Yes, we’re sending and dealing with more email than ever, but we’re also getting a lot more done on our own timetable. I say: Cut email some slack. Everyone has to come up with their own best solution for dealing with the volume and information overload seven days a week…with the help of sites like Web Worker Daily, of course. Is one day of email cold turkey enough? Is email the habit that needs breaking, or will we simply get our connection and information “fix” somewhere else?
Personally, I find those who interrupt my concentration with an unnecessary phone call (or face-to-face drop-in) to be far more annoying and stress-inducing than those who send 30 messages a day.
If you were forced to avoid email on a specific day of the work week, could you do it? Would you find your time better spent, or would you just postpone matters until you could email again?
12 Comments Post your own comment
ebrown says: October 11th, 2007 2:26pm
If I were forced, could I give up one day of email a week? Sure I could.
Would I find my time better spent or postpone the matter? My time would be well spent during the “no email” day and I would postpone answering emails until the following day.
This is something I have wrestled with for several years. I actually tracked my time over a two week period to see where it was going. I spent over 50% of my time responding to emails!
I needed to get a handle on it quick. So I adopted several ideas, that when I am disciplined to practice (key word - discipline) work very well:
- Create sub folders in Outlook labeled Hot, To Act On, and To Read (helps prioritize)
- Have a set time, an hour, for email (right before lunch worked well)
- Retrain my contacts (folks knew I would respond quickly so they sent me emails on the fly. I started to let them know I was going to specify a certain time each day and then my contacts started to police them selves about what they sent)
- Finally, (gasp!) I had my email disabled on my Blackberry — it was starting to feel like a leash.
Hope that helps. Being a creative makes staying organized are a challenge for me, so I welcome any fresh ideas.
Anne Zelenka says: October 11th, 2007 4:06pm
I saw that article too and was thinking maybe a better approach to cutting down on email would be to encourage use of other tools where possible (instant messaging, group chat, blogs and wikis for discussion, etc.) Of course, we know how hard it can be to get teams out of email into other tools — almost impossible! So that might not be a decent solution either.
I could do without email myself, but I’d worry what I was missing out on, because a lot of people with stuff I’m interested in contact me via email and they might not be able to find other channels.
As for people calling me instead of emailing: no thanks!
Lawrence Salberg says: October 11th, 2007 6:07pm
Companies are lost and visionless. The more bureaucratic and corporate, the more wayward they have become.
Email is a part of work. It is a part of communication. Companies are still trying to compartmentalize it. They are still trying to separate computer time from “work time”. They believe internet time is bad time.
Those same companies are spending energy coming up with inane policies like the above, instead of innovating, energizing, exciting, and capitalizing on all of the previous three. Thus, the future belongs to (and already is in the hands of) the freelancers, the entrepreneurs, and the small innovative (non-franchise) businesses of this country.
Hey, as long as they can’t email on Fridays, how about no telephone calls on Mondays, and no meetings on Wednesdays? Unless of course, they are to deal with urgent matters. All those trivial phone calls, meetings, and emails that U.S. Cellular normally allows in the course of their business should be postponed to “Trivial Tuesday” and “More Trivial Thursday”.
I hope U.S. Cellular’s customers and vendors get the memo so they know to flag their issues as “urgent”, else they’ll get booted down the week to be handled during games of Solitaire and coffee chat sessions. “Uh, sorry, sir. I’m not authorized to handle non-urgent issues today. Why? Because we are a bunch of micro-managed Neanderthals whose jack-booted bosses don’t trust to prioritize our own email inbox. Now, please excuse me because I have to also “look busy” on Urgent Friday. Call back Monday”.
Goes to show that some companies will live perpetually in the 20th century until they file for bankruptcy. Why not just give everyone Friday off?
Barbara says: October 11th, 2007 8:31pm
Why would I do that? There would be twice as much email the next day to answer. One of the best ways to avoid writing them, cuts down on replies.
Michael fitzgerald says: October 11th, 2007 9:48pm
As a freelancer working from home I accept that I will need to respond quickly to emails. The reason I’m a freelancer is that I chose to step outside the corporate hive so eloquently described by Lawrence Salberg above.
Amie Gillingham says: October 12th, 2007 5:06am
Considering we run our business via email (it’s how we talk to our customers, manage customer subscriptions to our services, and provide tech support) giving up emails one day a week is NOT an option. And any other “solution” we’d come up with that day would simply be replacing one type of time suckage for another. No thank you, lol.
Brendan says: October 13th, 2007 5:37am
Completely agree with Salberg. It’s sounds like the people at Cellular just don’t know how to handle e-mail. And it’s probably not the regular employees, but the higher management that can’t handle the e-mails.
Leo Babauta says: October 15th, 2007 5:44pm
I think it’s a good idea. Sure, it would limit communication … but sometimes that’s a good thing. It forces us to consider what’s truly essential, rather than just sending out massive amounts of communication because it’s easy.
A no-email day is just one way to limit email, but it’s not a bad way.
Judi Sohn says: October 16th, 2007 5:22am
But Leo, why a single day of the week? That’s what I don’t get. If it’s about limiting one to email that’s truly essential, then impose a byte or word limit. Not recommending that, of course, but it makes more sense that an arbitrary day of the week to unilaterally pull a communication tool out from under workers.
Stephen D Barnes says: October 16th, 2007 8:57pm
The real issue is not email per se. It’s the fact that modern email software interfaces merely allow you to exchange information yet do not give you the easy ability to organise the work that results from all the email you send and receive.
Consenquently for most people, the Inbox becomes a never-ending, one-dimensional rolling to do list that quickly becomes unmanageable over time. Throw in the poor habits of others in not discerning when email should properly be used to communicate with you and suddenly you have the chaos called email overload.
Not surprising really.
Check out our solution at http://www.orla.org. Its all laid out there as to what is really required to sort this problem out once and for all.
Technology alone is not the answer.
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