Email: too much of a good thing?: November 05, 2001 issue of New Thinking

November 05, 2001 New Thinking:
Email: too much of a good thing?

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November 05, 2001

Email: too much of a good thing?

By Gerry McGovern

Email is regarded as a primary tool of the new economy. It has become a critical means of communication for a great many organizations and individuals. Email is used because it makes communication more efficient and cost effective. However, there are signs that email aids unnecessary communication. Is email becoming a productivity drain, rather than a productivity gain?

Last week I received an email from a friend who was commenting on my piece on the technology productivity paradox. He mentioned a conversation he had had with an executive from Aldi, a very successful discount retailer chain. To quote from his email: "None of their senior managers (or lower levels) are allowed to have email. Phone and fax is what runs the company. Why are they like this? Email does not aid productivity."

My immediate response to this statement was: How could that be? I live by email. Without it, I would be totally cut off. But that's obviously not the case for Aldi. The view that email does not aid productivity is backed up by a number of studies and reports:

In September 2001, IDC predicted that there will be 1.2 billion email mailboxes by 2005, up from 505 million in 2000. It also predicted that by 2005 there will be 36 billion person-to-person emails sent worldwide every day.
In July 2001, Ferris Research predicted that 2001 would see a 50 percent rise in the number of emails business users would receive, with further growth of between 35-50 percent during 2002.
In July 2001, a Gartner study stated that business users receive an average of 22 email messages a day, and spend an average of 49 minutes every day managing their email. Gartner stated that much email is not relevant. It compared unproductive email to, “being killed by friendly fire. It's like carbon monoxide. It's colorless, odorless”.
In May 2001, Support.com published a survey of IT professionals globally which found that email software caused more problems than any other software application.

Has the Internet become the Trojan Horse of information overload? Millions embrace email and the Web, believing that greater productivity will be achieved. Yet, it looks like millions have become unwilling participants in a great productivity swindle.

The root cause of the problem is a counter-productive thinking about content and communication. Deep down, many of us fundamentally believe that more and bigger is better. How come when you ask 100 people to write 1,000 words on a subject, 80 will write more than 1,000 words, 18 will write just 1,000 words and only 2 will write less than 1,000 words?

Communication and content are not commodities. More communication can harm rather than aid productivity. More content can mean more wasted time. The world realized that it couldn't sustain 20 billion people and measures were taken to slow population growth. The business world can't sustain 36 billion email messages a day. It's time for some form of limit, some form of penalty for those who clog up the information arteries.

Gerry McGovern

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