Are Emails Ruining Business?

Here’s the problem, so much time is spent reading, researching and responding to email that there’s little time left over for:

1. Talking to each other

2. Doing the work that needs to be done

In my experience, email is the work for a lot of people and many cagey office workers have found all the wonderful ways email allows you to transfer responsibility to others, postpone decisions and delay doing things except reading emails.

Email – you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it. Phones have helped resuscitate it, just as they have changed the way we talk to each other. Jerry Seinfeld says that when we got these phones and had the choice between talking and texting, the decision was easy. “Texting means I only want to hear my side of the conversation,” he says. The same could be said for email.

Until we begin to harness these tools – connect email to collaborative tools and begin to find ways to actually talk to each other – we are going to spin our wheels faster and faster and the system will inevitably break in a big way.