Maybe E-mail Isn't Such a Great Idea, After All

Maybe E-mail Isn't Such a Great Idea, After All

 

By Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor Posted on October 18, 2007, Printed
on October 18, 2007

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/65380/

 

Ken Siegel doesn't beat around the bush. He doesn't like e-mail.

 

"I don't even have an e-mail account," he says. "When I tell that to the
executives I work with, first they look at me with surprise, and then they
look at me with envy."

 

Dr. Siegel, a psychologist and president of Impact Group, management
consultants in Los Angeles, is on a bit of a crusade. He wants there to be
less e-mail in the world. So he's helping his business clients organize
activities such as a "no e-mail Friday" in order to increase productivity.
That's right: increase productivity.

 

"E-mail is not a communication device, it's a broadcasting device," says
Siegel. "It will actually truncate communication. And in the truest sense of
the word, it has become a psychological dependency. We have convinced
ourselves that we can't live without it."

 

E-mail takes up more and more of our time at work, according to Radicati
Group, a Palo Alto, Calif., research and consulting firm. E-mails sent by a
company's workers are projected to increase 27 percent this year, to an
average of 47 a day -- up from 37 a day in 2006. And that's not the upper
ranks of a company, where even more e-mails can accumulate.

 

The question then becomes "Do we really want our company to be spending so
much of its time doing something that ultimately isn't productive?" But how
can we live without it?

 

Take, for example, my full-time job at National Public Radio. I get e-mails
nonstop all day long: e-mails about stories, e-mails from human resources,
e-mails about people looking for lost Blackberrys or books that they left in
a recording booth, e-mails purportedly from high-ranking folks in Nigeria
who want to give me lots of money, e-mail about ... You get the picture.

 

I can almost hear Siegel smiling on the phone as I recite this litany. He's
obviously heard this before. "And how many of those e-mails are you really
glad you got?" Truthfully? Not all of them, for sure.

 

That's his point exactly. Siegel says people need to consider how much
e-mail adds "to the value of their days." Most of the executives he works
with say they spend two to three hours a day on e-mail (about 150 to 250
messages) and on average only 16 to 19 percent of those messages met the
value-added criterion.

 

Siegel is also blunt about another use for e-mail.

 

"E-mail has become the 21st century's 'cover your butt' technique of
choice," he says. "It's also become the interpersonal coward's device of
choice."

 

People will send e-mail as a way to avoid dealing with an issue, by
pointedly not dealing with it in a quick, prompt manner, he says. If you
have a problem that needs to be solved quickly, e-mail is almost always the
worst way to approach that solution.

 

And the problem has grown worse as more and more businesses expect employees
to use personal digital assistants such as Blackberrys and Treos. Once upon
a time, we only had to worry about e-mail when we were at our desks. Now it
follows us around, virtually tugging at our sleeves, demanding that we pay
attention.

 

When Siegel works with business executives, he tries to give them strategies
to tame the digital beast and get more value from their work. Thus "No
e-mail Fridays" were born. But it was not a painless birth for many who
tried it. In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, Nancy Flynn,
executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, Ohio, training and
consulting firm, supported the idea of no e-mail one day a week. But she
included a warning: "When you try to take e-mail away from some users,
they're going to panic." Panic? I would expect riots.

 

Ever seen people with their Blackberrys? It's like watching Pavlov's dog.
The moment the stimulus is given (an e-mail arrives), the response is
provoked: "Must answer now!" Siegel agrees that it's not easy. But the
benefit, he says, is -- yes -- increased productivity once you get over
those initial panic attacks.

 

Siegel says once people can't rely on e-mail, problems are solved more
quickly. An e-mail string that might bounce back and forth in six to 12
messages over a day or two sometimes can be solved with a 10-minute
face-to-face meeting. And that face-to-face thing actually improves
relationships.

 

Siegel offers other ideas. One executive he worked with started blocking all
messages on which he was cc'd. After a while, people realized that if they
wanted this executive to help solve an issue, they would have to talk to him
in person.

 

Siegel knows that e-mail is a part of our working world now, and there's no
turning back. But he also believes that it's time we grabbed the e-mail bull
by its horns and wrestle it into submission. E-mail should not dictate how
we operate at work, or even at home, he says.

 

"E-mail is a tool with clear and viable uses and benefits," Siegel
concludes. "Communication isn't one of them. Businesses and individuals need
to set guidelines when it should be used and when it shouldn't be used. And
we'll all be better off once we do it."

 

Tom Regan is a columnist for The Christian Science Monitor.

 

C 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.



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