Slashdot Mirror
Buried in email?
Jethro73 writes "There is an article on Yahoo! about how Workers are mired in e-mail wasteland. They say employees waste an hour a day managing e-mail. This page at Cisco claims employees spend two hours per day, but cite a 15% increase in worker's productivity despite that." A few weeks ago I blew up my laptop and lost all my mail filters. When I got everything back up, I discovered that over 70% of my email is junk (compared to 25% after all my filters were in place). Filtering my mail is the only thing that makes reading my email possible. Well, that and ignoring any message complaining about Karma :)
hmm, maybe 4th class, too--I think that that's the classification for books . . .
hawk
A lot (or in slashdot-speak alot) of people are say (to paraphrase) "yeah, but without email you'd have to try to reach people on the phone or in person."
I don't think that anyone is debating the usefulness of email. OTOH, people do things (that in my opinion they shouldn't do) via email that they would NEVER do in person or via phone.
At my last job I'd say I got 40 messages a day that had NOTHING to do with work.
To: Everyone[company name withheld]
Subjects:
"Chili cookoff on Friday!" (Reminder number 12)
"Used mattress for sale."
"Marking newsletter for [today]" (that only marketing people care about. EVERY F---ING DAY!)
To: EveryoneAustin[company name withheld]
"Someone [at the building across town] left their lights on."
"Cake in the breakroom [at the building across town]"
Now, I LOVE email. But Merciful God STOP THESE PEOPLE.
Of course these people think this stuff is important, and think they are doing every one a favor. What they fail to realize is that they are wasting my valuable (slashdot) time.
Anyway, that's my rant.
-Peter
I'm watching a NasaTV stream as I'm surfing slashdot, and guess what they're doing?
They're debugging Yuri's Outlook setup. Looks like NT dropped a drive mapping to where Yuri's outlook .pst was, so it remade it's own.
Even in microgravity, email kills productivity and MS sucks. ;)
Look, if workers aren't communicating, there's a problem. E-mail is the least obtrusive, most efficient communications method, bar none. I have enough interruptions in my day without Instant Messaging!
Now, if the Gartner Group were to analyze the amount of time IT workers spend reading Slashdot... Ooops! Gotta run, boss is coming!
Never take a beer to a job interview.
The asynchronous method of communicating is almost always best in business. I find that 95% of my questions for someone are not time-critical, and can be handled at the other person's convenience (say, in a day or two), and allow me to keep working without having to interrupt my task to go find the person.
Yet I hear so many people say "Oh, I get 30 messages a day!" I say "Yeah, but those are 30 communications you were going to get anyway, but now you can handle them when YOU want, without the other person having to track you down."
--
Sure, sometimes you need face time. Part of the problem is not knowing which medium to use. Roughly, the rules I use are:
- Intranet site: Information that could be widely useful, but probably not by everyone.
- Email: Simple questions that aren't time critical.
- Phone: Simple questions that are time critical, or the person is far away.
- Face-to-face: Anything involving idea or knowledge creation, or anything involving personal/personnel issues.
- Overhead paging: Only reserved for someone being on fire.
This last one is a pet peeve of mine. I'm so annoyed at how my employers for the past 10+ years have no idea how intrusive overhead paging is, and how 90% of the time it's not as time-sensitive as that sort of immediacy requires.--
Email is an incredibly efficient means of communication. Senders can compose their thought without taking anyone else's time. They can multicast without getting people in the room or on the phone. All communications can be archived. Recipients can automatically file and prioritize. They can decide what to read, when to read it, when to stop reading. They can delete, file, defer. They can compose a reply to whichever points they wish, along-side the original message, all on their own time. Linux kernel developers probably get (at least) an order of magnitude more mail than the average office worker, but kernel development remains efficient.
Yet companies really do try to curtail email, all because some employees have bad email skills, which sets off the managers who have the old-school intuition that communication should be carefully channelled. This matters because, incredible as it may seem, it will probably affect you sometime. You will find yourself in a situation where there is pressure, or even a dictum, to ration email. To combat this, we must help people use email efficiently.
Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how to do this, because I think the biggest factor is psychological. People who have become comfortable with traditional business environments are used to hearing only what they need to hear. Yes--this includes techies, many of whom expect to think only about their particular domain. They become anxious or confused when they get something that doesn't directly apply to them. They need to learn that 1. skimming this email can be valuable, because they will learn more about related activities in the company, and discover unexpected ways in which they can advise or contribute; and 2. deleting or filing messages without reading them can be ok.
Has anyone seen an "email skills" approach that worked?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Email massively improves productivity.
Most middle managers spend all day emailling their friends and contracting email viruses rather than irritating the socks off the engineers in extremely long boring meetings.
Anything that takes up manager time is bound to improved productivity.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
A lot of our customer's are in Canada's Bible Belt (Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission -- British Columbia), and let me tell you: you haven't heard moral outrage until you've heard an offended Xtian mother complain about receiving Hot Slippery Teens in her mailbox...
Carousel is a lie!
----
We, the upper management of eSourceTec Inc., have discovered that employees have been wasting valuable time dealing with unnecessary e-mail. Here are the steps we are taking to eliminate this waste of time and energy:
1. All employees will be required to attend a series of company meetings on the subject of "Eliminating Unnecessary E-mail."
2. Following these meetings, employees will be required to attend department specific "E-Mail Task Force" meetings to come up with specific strategies for eliminating unnecessary e-mail.
3. Each day, employees will be required to send e-mail to their managers summarizing the amount and type of e-mail they have sent that day, flagging any e-mail exchanges that they feel could have been shortened or eliminated.
4. On a weekly basis, managers will have a one-on-one session with each employee in which they discuss how well e-mail strategies have been implemented, and what new strategies might be employed in the elimination of unnecessary e-mail.
We feel confident that these steps will drastically reduce the amount of time spent each day on pointless and unnecessary tasks, and lead our company into new strata of efficiency.
Regards,
D. R. Baskerville
Vice-President, Attention Allocation Resources
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
Most employees I know would say that about 50% of the meetings they attend are unnecessary, and that only 10% of the discussions I hear in meetings demand any of my attention at all. Any dissenting opinions? No?
E-mail is a huge advantage, then, in that it gives me the power to delete memos and announcements that aren't important to me in just a few seconds, instead of having to throw away dead trees or walk in and out of useless meetings that do the same.
I say, viva la company e-mail. We'll always have to deal with useless intra-office crap, but at least with e-mail we can deal with it in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible (well, unless you're the network administrator).
Having lots of mail is extremely useful on the job. For example, at my last job, my schedule would go like this:
12:00 Get to work (I have classes, so I was allowed to be late) drop my cds in my office, turn on my computer
12:15 Go on break with friends, recount last days events
12:45 Go back to office, check mail
1:15 Go on break, talk about email and office rumors
1:45 Go back to office and eat lunch
2:15 Cigarrette break
2:45 Reread mail to make sure I didn't miss anything
3:15 Look for work
3:30 Cigarrette break
3:45 Try to find a manager to get work to do
4:15 Found manager, got work
4:30 Break
4:45 Begin working
5:00 Leave unfinished work for tomorrow
5:15 Break
5:45 Relax
6:15 Read email sent today
6:45 Turn off computer
7:00 Break
7:45 Go home
If it wasn't for email, I would've had to actually work
Let's eliminate email, so that all those employees will instead spend that nearly an hour a day talking to the people they used to email!!
We've got MBA's and we're brilliant!!!
Why do those engineers think they have to communicate with each other to write code? Silly engineers. We should keystroke monitor them to see how much code they're writing per minute, and just pay them per line of code. God it's great to be a middle manager!