Many have written on the issues that email causes, here are some highlights:
Email soaks up time – e.g. McKinsey in 2012 reckoned 30% of average office worker’s week was spent reading and answering email
… makes people feel they are being productive (when they are not)
… locks up information in silos – a lot of company knowledge creation is carried out in email threads visible only to those involved, and almost impossible for anyone else to discover, leading to duplication of work,
- … is exclusive, with conversations only open to those who the sender sought to include
- which can lead to lower quality work, because the conversation does not necessarily include the right people
- and which completely prevents
… is intrusive – when you send me an email you force my attention to your issue, interrupting my thoughts
… is a terrible way to share lists of actions (especially if they are buried in an email chain
… spawns and propagates some of the worst forms of office politics with the use of cc and bcc
Lastly, no list of the things wrong with email would be a complete without a reference to Luis Suarez and his six+ year experiment on living and working without email. A good place to start is his summary post “Life without email – year 6, weeks 21 to 24“
