Posted by Pierre Khawand on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 08:24 AM
Last week, I wrote about 5 specific behaviors that e-mail users
tend to display, and that can drive their team's productivity down.
These behaviors were
- Not responding to legitimate e-mails and leave others in the dark
- Abandoning e-mail conversations in the middle and leave them hanging
- Responding to e-mail only partially leaving important issues unanswered
- Responding to e-mail vaguely delaying dealing with the real issues
- Copying everyone and their brother unnecessarily
I also included a brief self-assessment (the 3-minute e-mail "airhead" test) that can help us reflect on the above behaviors and recognize how much we engage in them.
From Self to Others
While a self-assessment can be useful, the real assessment needs to include "others"; the people who send us e-mail or are on the receiving end of our e-mails, and who may have differing opinions about whether we engage in these e-mail "airhead" behaviors and to what degree.
I am inviting you to involve others in helping you assess your e-mail behaviors by sending them this 360-degree feedback form (see below), so they can give you their input on your e-mail behaviors. Forward to them the form and ask them for their feedback (anonymously if preferable). Ideally you would include people from all angles, like your colleagues, your direct reports, your manager, and potentially people from other groups.
Download the e-mail 360-degree feedback (PDF, Microsoft Word, Web Form)
Once you gather the feedback, compare it to your own self-assessment, and see what you learn, and what adjustments you might want to make to how you manage e-mail.
Score interpretation
As a recap from last week, here is the interpretation of the score:
- Total e-mail airhead: Total score of 15 or above
- Semi e-mail airhead: Total score of 10 to 14
- Human e-mail user: Total score of 7 to 9
- Accomplished e-mail user: Total score of 4 to 6
- Total e-mail geek: Total score of 0 to 3
Stay tuned for more tips and techniques relating to e-mail management!
Additional resources
The Managing and Organizing Your E-mail Inbox
The Accomplishing More With Less Workbook
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Thu, Aug 19, 2010 @ 10:58 AM
We all do some of this at least some of the time, but when we do most of this and most of the time, this can drive our productivity and our team's productivity down drastically.
5 things that e-mail airheads do
- Don't respond to legitimate e-mails and leave others in the dark
- Abandon e-mail conversations in the middle and leave them hanging
- Respond to e-mail only partially leaving important issues unanswered
- Respond to e-mail vaguely delaying dealing with the real issues
- Copy everyone and their brother unnecessarily
Take the 3-minute e-mail airhead test now!
Interpreting the score
After you take the test and add your scores, please review the following:
- Total e-mail airhead: Total score of 15 or above
- Semi e-mail airhead: Total score of 10 to 14
- Human e-mail user: Total score of 7 to 9
- Accomplished e-mail user: Total score of 4 to 6
- Total e-mail geek: Total score of 0 to 3
Stay tuned for more tips and techniques relating to how to deal with e-mail "airheads" and how not to be one, more often than not!
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Mon, Jul 26, 2010 @ 03:13 PM
Fearlessly facing the issues
E-mail messages, especially the not-so-easy ones, seem to sit in our inbox for a while before we finally take actions on them. We may agonize about them for days and looking at them dozens of times before we finally take the necessary action. By that time, it may be too late and we may find ourselves missing important windows of opportunities or critical deadlines and therefore needing to do some damage repair. Or even if it is not late, we still feel exhausted and guilty, having spent valuable mental and emotional energy without making much progress.
You know these messages that I am referring to. Scan your inbox right now and identify 5 to 10 of these messages and let’s get to work:
- If you need more information before you can handle the message (like more clarification on certain issues, or access to a report that has some relevant data), then initiate the request to get the necessary information. Put a reminder so that if you don’t get the information within the necessary timeframe, you can follow-up in a timely manner. Then move to the next message.
- If you need time to think through the content of the message and/or preform the related task, then set time on your calendar to do so, and then move to the next message (most important treat this time like a serious appointment that is not easily subject to change. So when the time comes, just do it!).
- If you need to consult with others before you can handle the message, then initiate the request to consult with the relevant people. Also, put that reminder so you can follow-up. Then move to the next message.
- If you have the information you need, and don’t need more time to think it through or perform a related task, and don’t need advice from others, then prompt yourself to take the action now! If you have been postponing such a message, it is likely that what is stopping you is an underlying fear of facing the issues (making a decision, saying no to people, giving information or opinions that may rock the boat, etc.). So the solution is to fearlessly face the issues and learn in the process. Below is the 5 step process that can help you do so.
Fearlessly Facing The Issues: A Five Step Approach
- Step 1: Draft your “fearless” response (but don’t send it yet). In other words, how would you respond if you had no fear and if you were to face the issues to the best of your knowledge.
- Step 2: Write down what you are afraid of (specific thoughts that are causing your fear), and what are the likelihood that these unfortunate events will come true (jot this down, don’t just think it), and how you would manage them if they would come true.
- Step 3: Review your “fearless” response again and potentially refine it to minimize any associated risks. At this point you may already feel ready to face the issues and send your response. If not, go to step 4.
- Step 4: Get feedback about your response from someone else, and preferably someone objective who is not a stakeholder in the issues. Get some objective feedback on your analysis in step 2 above.
- Step 5: Refine your response and send it and stay tuned for more learning.
If you start fearlessly facing the e-mail issues on a daily basis (every time you go to your inbox), you are likely to dismantle these fears quickly and accelerate your e-mail process!
Additional Resources
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 01:57 PM
It does seem out of reach for many business professionals, but it is not, as we provided in the special webinar that we conducted last week. In this webinar, and after we explained the process and demonstrated the techniques, and answers participants questions, we gave everyone 20 minutes to work on their e-mail inbox and try to process as many e-mails as possible.
The results were plausible. Before we started the session, we asked the participants to tell us how many e-mails they had in their inbox. The poll consisted of the following answers:
- Less than 25
- Between 25 and 50
- Between 51 and 100
- Between 101 and 500
- More than 500
Here were the answers before and after the session
| |
Before |
After |
| Less than 25 |
0% |
20% |
| Between 25 and 50 |
0% |
0% |
| Between 51 and 100 |
18% |
30% |
| Between 101 and 500 |
27% |
30% |
| More than 500 |
55% |
20% |
PS: Please note that the percentages don't add up to 100% because not all participants participated in the poll
What made this possible is not just the process but also the focused time we took to work on it. The face that we were doing it as a group provided an additional motivation and make this goal of emptying the inbox a shared goal--we were all in it together.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by your e-mail inbox, consider transforming e-mail from being an ad-hoc activity to being a structured activity, and instead of being on e-mail all day long, spend focused time on e-mail, and then leave it alone and focus on the more important activities. Check out the resources below to get this started.
Additional Resources
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Mon, May 17, 2010 @ 10:16 PM
So far, I wrote about 2 strategies (
Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at, and
Simplifying and optimizing the process) and today, I will continue with the 3rd strategy which is “
Significantly reducing the output and the input.” As you know if you have been following this series of articles which I started in March, my goal is to tackle the issue of e-mail management from several angles. The ultimate goal is to formulate effective and sustainable strategies, as opposed to quick and short lived fixes, for getting the e-mail overload well under control and leading more accomplished and happier work lives.
I need your involvement
The e-mail (and Social Media) challenges are not going away anytime soon. In addition, the benefits and opportunities that these technologies bring are humungous. I need your involvement in helping address these challenges and maximize these benefits. Here is how you can help.
- Set 30 minutes of uninterrupted time on your calendar this week to:
- Review the 3 articles that I already published on this topic (#1, #2, as well as this article which is strategy #3)
- Share your feedback about these topics by adding your comments to above articles as you see fit (see comment section at the bottom of each article page)
- Start to implement these strategies and report on your experiences and the results you are getting and any additional feedback you might have.
- Take the 5 minute e-mail and Social Media survey which will help you reflect on relevant issues and become part of this effort.
- Encourage your team to do the same. E-mail after all impacts all of us!
And now back to Strategy #3: Significantly reducing the output and the input
Significantly reducing the output
“Why worry about the output?” you might ask! Isn’t our main goal to manage our “in”box? Which is basically the input that comes our way?
You are probably familiar with the saying: “What goes around comes around.” And this is so true for e-mail. The more output we create, the more input will be generated. This is not just about quantity but also about quality. Sending e-mails that are not clear and not relevant to the core business issues at hand is likely to generate more questions, more distractions, and endless back and forth e-mails conversations that contribute little or no value. Copying people unnecessarily is sure to turn these conversations into an avalanche. So output is one of the root causes of input. That is why we will start with the output first.
By the way, strategy #1 (
Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at) already paved the road and started the journey of reducing the output. Actually we can argue that strategy #1 is all about reducing the output when we apply it individually and it is about reducing the input when we apply it as a group. This brings an interesting question: “Is the e-mail overload primarily an individual problem or a group problem?” Of course it is both, but if you had to choose, which would you choose as the primary?
I believe it is primarily an individual problem and secondarily (but a close second) a group problem. Why? Because when we sit at that computer, or iPad, or whatever device we use, and create that e-mail, this is an individual effort. Whatever I start in that e-mail is the beginning of a chain reaction that is likely to impact the group and pick up momentum; hence the extra care required in creating each and every message.
In addition to strategy #1, and assuming you have mastered that strategy and encouraged your team to do so, here are the next steps in reducing the output:
- Answer/send an e-mail only when it is related to your top priorities and your team’s top priorities, and only when you are adding significant value; difficult to do, but you will save a lot of time and people will start paying more attention to your e-mails when they get them.
- If you wish to share your knowledge and expertise or socialize with people and groups outside your team and your top priorities, find other ways to do so. E-mail is not the best tool for sharing knowledge and for socializing.
- Another variation to step #1 above is to wait on, or not answer, the non-urgent and not so important e-mails. It is likely that the issue will go away or someone else will address it. People will also learn not to send you the not so important stuff.
- Answer/send 140 characters; if there is more to say, put it in bullet points or a numbered list. Make it clear and succinct. Elevate the standards for e-mail composition instead of adopting or accepting the lowest common denominator.
- Address the core issues and not dance around them. Stop and check-in again if e-mail is the best way to do so. But if it is, get to these issues sooner than later. Save yourself and your team significant time and demonstrate and model direct and open communication.
- Delegate issues and decisions and don’t ask to be copied on them. Instead ask to be consulted only on as-needed basis, and to be updated when critical points are reached. Invest your time in developing the people instead of reading and writing e-mails.
- Keep checking with yourself as to whether you should move this issue to a medium other than e-mail.
Significantly reducing the input
As you put the steps suggested above into practice, the input will be significantly less. In addition, here are some additional steps you can take the further reduce the input:
- Unsubscribe from e-mail lists that are not related to your top priorities. Unfortunately most of us don’t have the luxury to go through secondary topics and issues. While this information may be helpful, it can also be very distracting. If you haven’t looked at these e-mails for a while, this is a sufficient indication that you need to unsubscribe.
- Add rules and filters to file selected e-mails into designated folders which can then be visited on an as-needed basis. Be creative with these rules, using sender’s names or e-mail addresses for instance, or keywords in the subject line or body, or whatever else can help you identify them.
- Add rules and filter to categorize (or color) and sort the important messages based on the sender such as your and your customers. While this does not reduce the input per se, it does guide you to the most important input first.
- Create an auto-reply that provides people with helpful resources and asks them to resend their inquiry if they still need help; This can work well if you happen to receive many generic requests that your senders can get answers for from self-service resources that are easily available.
- Delegate the first pass of e-mail processing to your assistant if that is an option; If you have someone assisting you with your office work, consider training them to go through your e-mails, categorize the ones that require your attention, and process or file the rest.
Stay tuned for the next Tip-Of-The-Month article where I will discuss the next strategy: "Fearlessly facing the issues."
Also, stay tuned for the upcoming book on how to manage the e-mail overload and Social Media (these articles and the latest findings from our ongoing research and development effort will be part of the book)!
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Sun, Apr 18, 2010 @ 01:23 PM
Many of the business professionals we talk to seem to report that they spend endless hours in their e-mail inboxes. They tend to "live" there checking e-mail every few minutes or even seconds, having a dozen of e-mail messages open simultaneously, hopping from one to the next, and then deserting the latest one as soon as they hear the beep or see the alert, to open yet another message. Someone confessed recently at one of our workshops that when no new e-mails show up, he sometimes catches himself pressing the send/receive button repeatedly as if he is desperate for more. Does it sound like an addiction? Well, it is.
There is a lot more to discuss about this addiction, and this will be one of the topics we will touch on in future articles, but for now, we are going to focus on simplifying and optimizing the process--the e-mail management process that is. This is the second out of five strategies that I layout out in the last tip-of-the-month in which I also discussed the first strategy: "Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at."
The simplified e-mail process
Instead of "living" in the inbox and working on e-mail messages in an ad-hoc fashion, how about treating e-mail like any other task with a beginning and an end. We will discuss below how frequently we engage into this task, but for now, let us focus on the mechanics of this task. Let us also give this task a name: "Processing the Inbox." Processing the Inbox consists of the following:
- Going through the inbox one message at a time, starting with the most recent, and not leaving that message until we make a decision about it.
- If a message is urgent, we handle it right away.
- If a message is quick and easy, we hand it right away.
- If a message cannot be handled right away, for one reason or another, we make a decision about when we want or need to handle it and flag accordingly (or categorize it, or tag it, or label it, depending on which e-mail application you are using):
- If it has to be handled today, then flag it with a red flag
- It it can wait until tomorrow or later, then flag it with a blue flag
- If it can be delegated to someone else, then forward it to them, and flag it with a yellow flag
Processing the Inbox is not complete until you process all the new messages in the inbox (the messages that arrived since you checked the inbox last).
To see this process in action, view the free training module (see form in the left column) which demonstrates the step by step process (in this case for Microsoft Outlook 2003, even though the above process can be adapted to any version of Outlook or any other e-mail application that supports tagging or labeling such as Google Mail, and applications with add-on's that support tagging such as MailTags for Mac Mail).
The optimized e-mail process
Now that we have a process down, and we don't just do e-mail one at a time and endlessly, there is still an important questions to answer, and that is how often do we check e-mail? In other words, how do we optimize our workflow?
This brings us to the core issue that I have been evangelizing for years, and which I recently published in its most comprehensive form: The Results Curve--How to Manage Focused and Collaborative Time (free download available). I won't discuss the details of the Results Curve here, but according to the Results Curve, it is best to check e-mail every 40 minutes, or whatever length of focused time you choose. So instead of checking e-mail every few minutes or few seconds or as soon as you hear the beep or see the alert, let e-mail wait until the next collaborative session.
This also means that at the end of the day, we need to leave room for an e-mail session, where we go through the messages we flagged for today, and handle these messages.
Before you answer your next e-mail, stop for a second and ask the question: Should I interrupt my current task and jeopardize my results, or should I wait until the next collaborative session?
Stay tuned for the next Tip-Of-The-Month article where I will discuss the next strategy: "Significantly reducing the output and the input."
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Sun, Mar 28, 2010 @ 08:19 PM
In this series of articles, my goal is to tackle the issue of e-mail management from several angles. The e-mail overload problem is multi-faceted and not something that can be solved quickly. Most of us, bloggers and Twitterers are guilty of giving the impression that we can help our readers solve major problems by giving them the miraculous solution in a few paragraphs or even 140 characters. Let us stop this wishful thinking. Significant challenges require innovative solutions and persistent application of these solutions as well as ongoing learning and adjustment. This requires trial and error over a period of time until we find the winning formula.
If you are getting a large number of e-mails and feeling that e-mail is exhausting and out of control, I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that there is no immediate and easy solution (other than finding a new job and starting fresh, which is only a temporary solution). The good news is that there is a whole set of effective strategies that we can deploy to get the e-mail overload well managed. All together, these strategies are likely to bring us a significant relief and help us refocus our energy on the core issues and create more compelling results.
In the upcoming weeks and months, I will be writing a series of articles on this blog and elsewhere addressing at least five of these e-mail strategies and probably more. While many of these strategies are derived from the Accomplishing More With Less Methodology (see free e-book, workbook, and workshops), these articles will also include the latest findings from our ongoing research effort and will be part of the upcoming book on how to effectively manage your e-mail and Social Media activities. Hope you will join us in this effort and participate in the E-mail and Social Media 5-minute survey as well as post your comments on this blog.
The five e-mail strategies
Simply put, here are the five e-mail strategies:
- Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at
- Simplifying and optimizing the process
- Significantly reducing the output and the input
- Fearlessly facing the issues
- Attacking the root causes
Let us start with the first strategy and stay tuned for more!
Using e-mail for what e-mail is best at
When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail:
Oh well! We have the hammer, and in this case it is called "e-mail." We have it and we tend to use it all the time. E-mail is easy. It is quick. It costs virtually nothing (if we are only looking at the hard costs). In addition, we can say whatever we want in an e-mail and not get interrupted by someone else's point of view (can be rewarding but dangerous). So no wonder why we are so quick to use it in almost any situation.
Blinded by the ease and speed of e-mail, among other factors, we tend to forget that e-mail is not the only tool for communicating. This is a list of some of the tools that can largely benefit us when used appropriately in conjunction with e-mail. What do you think these tools are ideal for and not so ideal for? Use this opportunity to jot down your answers and then compare with the answers below:
| |
Ideal for |
Not so ideal for |
| E-mail |
< jot down your answers > |
< jot down your answers> |
| Instant Messaging |
|
|
| Phone Calls |
|
|
| Web Conferencing |
|
|
| Virtual Worlds |
|
|
| Video Conferending |
|
|
| In-Person |
|
|
While there is not one answer, and no right or wrong answer, when it comes to how best to utilize these tools, here are some suggested answers as a starting point:
| |
Ideal for |
Not so ideal for |
| E-mail |
Factual/Asynchronous |
Emotional |
| Instant Messaging |
Quick exchanges |
Long exchanges |
| Phone Calls |
Discussions |
Visuals |
| Web Conferencing |
Document sharing |
Interacting/Seeing people |
| Virtual Worlds |
Interacting |
Simple hardware setup |
| Video Conferending |
Seeing people |
Simple hardware setup |
| In-Person |
Complex/Emotional |
Remote people |
Let us add a few more asynchronous tools to the mix
- Blogs
- Wikis
- SharePoint
- Google Docs
Blogs, wikis, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs, and other information and document sharing tools, can tremendously help take the load off of e-mail. One of the examples that I give in our workshops relate to how blogs for instance (in this case, we are referring to internal blogs) can help the knowledge experts within the team or organization answer important questions once instead of time after time, and make these answers accessible to everyone within the team or organization. E-mail is not the best way to leverage and share knowledge.
Let us start using e-mail for what e-mail is best at! Before you write your next e-mail, stop for a second and ask the question: Should this be an e-mail or not?
Stay tuned for the next Tip-Of-The-Month article where I will discuss the next strategy: "Simplifying and optimizing the process."
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Fri, Feb 19, 2010 @ 12:02 PM
A few days ago, I posted an article about the Old terminology, new terminology: "People connecting with other people." A related topic that I have been thinking about is the "old" inbox and the "new" inbox. However the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is even a newer inbox: The Social Media Inbox. What do these inboxes mean and what are the implications of the advent of the Social Media Inbox? Keep on reading!
The old inbox
I still remember the days when the inbox meant internal e-mail only. I was in Southern California at a technology company with about 100 employees at the time and everyone had access to Microsoft Outlook and used it for internal e-mail and for scheduling internal meetings. The external world was not "visible" to internal employees. There was no Internet, if you can imagine. Only a few people had access to MCI and a few others to Compuserve. These privileged people were able to connect to the external world but still had to go through hoops to do it.
The new inbox
Then came the Internet and suddenly the "new" inbox was born. The new inbox is connected to the whole world. This brought amazing opportunities and also an unprecedented e-mail overload. Every person ended up with a handful of e-mail inboxes ranging from work, to personal, to "throw-away" ones just to keep unwanted messages out of the way. Soon after came the invasion of the mobile devices and e-mail on the go. Consolidating messages into one e-mail application and/or synchronizing between multiple applications and devices became necessities and many of us have done some degree of consolidation and synchronization along the way.
And now meet the "new new" inbox: The Social Media Inbox
Then Web 2.0 snuck upon us! Now we are all part of the creation process and part of the conversation. Like never before, we the people can share information, participate in conversations, and build our own social networks. We are in direct contact with the people who once were invisible. Suddenly we are no longer just in our e-mail inbox(es). We are now as often or even more often in our new and expanded inboxes: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, YouTube channels, del.icio.us bookmarks, StumbleUpon articles, and you name it, which all together I am calling the Social Media Inbox.
This inbox is emerging as a powerful force and even the most authoritative search engines are re-inventing their search approach to include the Social Media Inbox.
So what does it all mean? What are opportunities and the challenges?
The Social Media Inbox brings some unique opportunities and some rather unique challenges as well. On the opportunities side:
- We are connected with 100's of millions of people and are able to have real time conversations with them
- We are learning what they are like and how they think (market research)
- We are discussing our brand and the value that we bring to the table (marketing)
- We are influencing their buying decisions (sales)
- We are exchanging ideas and building on each other's ideas (innovation)
- And the list continues!
On the challenges side:
- We are faced with more information overload than ever before
- We are constantly interrupting our core activities to keep up with what is going on in the world
- We are not necessary leveraging this new inbox to the extent that we could
- And the list continues!
What does your Social Media Inbox (SMI) look like and how are you managing it?
If you haven't yet expanded your definition of the "inbox" and explored the Social Media world, this is the time to do so. Some exciting opportunities are awaiting you. If you have, this is the time to reflect further on the opportunities and challenges and how they can be managed to help us be more effective in the workplace and beyond.
As we continue to explore this topic and explore best practices to manage the SMI, we need your help! Please share your thoughts below or fill out this short Social Media Inbox survey (5 to 10 minutes) and we will share the survey results with you.
Take the Social Media Inbox survey and become part of the conversation!
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Wed, Dec 02, 2009 @ 06:56 AM
How do most of us start our day? When we ask our workshop participants this question, the answer we invariably get is: "on e-mail". Here are some of the reasons why we start the day on e-mail (and why we keep going back to e-mail every time we hear the beep or when we are at a loss of what to do next) and I would like to hear from you what are the top 3 reasons for you (choose from the list or add your own--post your comment below):
1. Curiosity: We are curious about what happened in the world since we checked e-mail last.
2. Hope for good news: This is the winning-the-lottery syndrome. It may happen to me! I may get this great promotion or great deal or great surprise from someone.
3. Feeling accomplished: Replying to e-mails gives us the feeling that we are getting things done. Each e-mail message answered is like a micro-project successfully completed and checked off the list.
4. Fear of being left behind: We want to make sure we are not missing important information or developments, and potentially losing our competitive edge.
5. Anxiety about outstanding tasks: We cannot relax if we have outstanding e-mail messages.
6. Avoidance: Instead of focusing on more important and usually more difficult tasks, it is easier to be on e-mail.
7. Lack of direction/Need for direction: We don't know exactly what we should be doing, e-mail give us the answer, at least a temporary fix.
8. Handling urgent stuff: We have to check e-mail because we get urgent requests on e-mail, which need to be handled immediately.
9. Meeting the expectations of others: It is usually expected that e-mails are answered fairly quickly, either by our boss, colleagues, or generally as part of the culture in our organization. If we don't meet these expectations, we may be seen as "not fully on top of things".
And there are probably more reasons. All together, these factors make e-mail seductive, addictive, rewarding, and anxiety-provoking, all at the same time!
Extracted from The Accomplishing More With Less Workbook, now available at Amazon.com
Posted by Pierre Khawand on Sat, Nov 14, 2009 @ 12:56 PM
This is the first post in what is likely to become a series of reflections on the role of e-mail and Social Media today and the upcoming years.
After 15 years of internet, is e-mail hanging on by a weak thread?
E-mail is overused and even abused, and users' mailboxes are congested--worse than traffic in the busiest metropolitan areas of the world. People are tired of scrolling up and down the inbox and many stopped looking at, and not to mention responding to, e-mail messages except for the urgent messages from their bosses or customers. Reaching people via e-mail (unless you are their boss or customer) has become quite challenging. It is "extreme" e-mail fatigue that we are suffering from. So many things fall through the cracks and so many inefficiencies are invading the work place and our personal lives. Does this sound like "chaos"? Well it is!
Is Social Media taking over?
While Web 2.0 tools (such as blogs, wikis, and Microsoft SharePoint) are emerging as the better alternatives for collaboration and information sharing, in this post, I am interested in focusing on the Social Media platforms and reflecting on their relationship to e-mail today and in the future.
Social media is the new kid on the blog (relatively new compared to good old e-mail). People are still excited about the Social Media platforms. Even though these platforms are quite busy, they tend to be less intrusive than e-mail, and they give users the ability to scan the feed casually and jump in and respond only when they desire to do so. The expectations are less while the reach is much broader. And these platforms provide messaging functionality (similar to e-mail and Instant Messaging) which seem to get more attention and better response time than the traditional e-mail.
And now the questions about the future of e-mail and social media
- Where do you see the future of e-mail versus Social Media?
- Will it get to our work life as well (having more structured enterprise Social Media platforms that would include collaboration and social media all in one within the firewall)?
- Will the traditional "public" e-mail approach eventually go away?
What do you think of this hypothetical chart showing how the time spent on e-mail (and therefore the role of e-mail) will diminish over the next few years while the time spent on Social Media will increase. E-mail me YOUR version of this chart (training@people-onthego.com):
Graph: Hypothetical hours spent per week on E-mail versus Social Media!