no_email

For quite some time Luis Suarez has been championing a Life Without Email, not just on his blog, but (amongst other places) in the Google+ community of the same name. Last month, he announced a new community in Slack around the same topic. Why two communities? As he brings out in that G+ post, while the G+ community is very much a Community of Interest, the Slack team is for those people who are both interested and driving initiatives (large or small) to reduce the inefficiencies we all suffer through an over-use of email – a Community of Practice. #

Luis Suarez (@elsua), curator of the Life without eMail G+ community, has posted a Vodcast co-presented with Claire Burge (@claireburge) Here’s the full video: 30) Here are my notes on the highlights of what Luis and Claire think is wrong with email: “Email creates a dumber workforce” (3:02), because (4:02) the structure of email forces an obsession with emptying the inbox without action. Email is a selfish tool (4:59) – centred around individual, not team or company goals (because you cannot see the impact of your email on the other person’s workload). #

No tool is all good or all bad, so following on from “Email – what’s wrong with it?“, here are some of the reasons why it is useful: Email is almost ubiquitous … has been around a long time, so almost everyone (in a work world) knows how to use it (or thinks they do) … allows asynchronous communication, especially with offline workers (actually so do other technologies) … is well-suited to notification-type communications #

Many have written on the issues that email causes, here are some highlights: Email soaks up time – e.g. McKinsey in 2012 reckoned 30% of average office worker’s week was spent reading and answering email … makes people feel they are being productive (when they are not) … locks up information in silos – a lot of company knowledge creation is carried out in email threads visible only to those involved, and almost impossible for anyone else to discover, leading to duplication of work, #