Capping IT Off
I know, I know, it’s a very popular thing to yell these days, but I honestly believe that 2009 will be a killing year for the value of email. People probably think that their productivity is measured by the amount of emails they send out and by the amount of people that they include in the CC field, causing vast amounts of unnecessary email traffic.
I see more and more people setting up rules in Outlook that move emails directly to the garbage bin when they are mentioned in the CC, something I’ve done as well last weekend. Enough is enough! I won’t let the overflow of emails take over my life anymore, especially if you have a Blackberry or other forms of push email this causes quite a lot of stress.
So by the fact that more and more people ignore the CC fields, this will lose more and more value. I’d say: try to avoid as much as possible to put people in the CC field. I tried it today very successfully. I only had to put one person in one email in the CC. Think about it, during the pre-email era with the fax machines we didn’t have CC either! A potential danger is that the same people that abuse the CC field, now are going to put everyone in the To field… Which is great since then it will completely kill the use of email.
Mark my words, 2009 will be the tipping point for email: companies will enforce rules for productivity and more and more people will attach less value to emails than before. I noticed that I actually do more and more phone calls or live meet ups than before (yes I feel ashamed as a computer geek) and my digital conversations have moved to Twitter and Facebook.
The funny thing is that the excessive adoption of technology as our means of communication will perhaps drive people more and more to old-skool forms of contact. The Internet will be personal again :-)
About the author
This is not a technical problem so trying to solve it technically is unlikely to work.
I have never had the problems of which you speak. However, I don’t see asynchronous communications going away. There are really two ways to communicate synchronously and asynchronously. For asynchronous communications, you have Twitter, TrulyMail, Facebook, and email. Email might go away but only if it is replaced by something else (see above list).
You will still have these non-technical issues in that people can still include you when posting to Facebook or TrulyMail. However, of course, both Facebook and TrulyMail are invitation based (you only get messages from people you know) so there is a natural spam-block. This still will not stop people you know from sending you things you do not want. For that, the solution is education.
Did you ever try talking to those people who include you on messages that do not matter to you?
Valid point John, perhaps companies should start giving “email etiquette” lessons during the onboarding of an employee :-) Or we should teach it in highschool or even kindergarten…
But my point is that inside large companies, a lot of people abuse email and especially the CC function by including half of the company (but I have to say that it is sometimes also a management problem since they want to be updated about every single thing that is happening).
Every time you put someone in a CC, you should ask yourself: “is it really necessary that i put that person in CC?”
I agree.
If previous years is any indication upon the future, I predict that e-mail will grow to become bigger than ever before. More people will join the online and digital community that is the Internet, through more broadband and wireless connections. Using cheap and portable devices, ranging from the tiny laptops to small mobile phones.
I think that John got it wrong when he mentions Twitter in the context of asynchronous communication. Twitter is a highly synchronous form of communication – and it’s more like an open room of discussions and you can jump in and out of focus whenever you choose too.
E-mail on the other hand, you’re forced to react upon. It’s your job to perform actions on the tasks appointed to you by e-mail communication. Technology is not going to help much in regards to personal e-mail organization – we already have the tools, you just need to find a pattern that works for your life- and workstyle.
Enjoy 2009 and I’m happy to know there will be important new things happening around the world (in 2009 and beyond) and I’m pretty sure this prediction is “Busted” in the good sense of Myth Busters.
Nice one Sondre!
Perhaps I should rephrase my title: “the value of email in the enterprise is declining due to the misuse of functionalities like CC and this could be resolved by email etiquette education”
Unfortunately I don’t see improvements in the use of CC in the company (it’s something you don’t see in private email usage, only in companies) so I am still throwing away the mails where i am in CC. it makes me a happier person :-)
We have a policy in my current project, you use CC if it’s information that might be useful for those who receive that carbon copy. CC means the e-mail does not contain any actions for YOU. I think that’s a good policy. My way of organizing e-mails is making sure my inbox is emptied every day. I have two (or really 4) folders where I organize my stuff: Archive, To-Do, To-Do/Archive and Important. That’s how I organize myself and it’s working pretty well. Flagging, Tasks, Follow-ups doesn’t work for me, single folder with action items (“To-do”) is excellent and I get work done.
Nah, not believing it. I will still e-mail when I am old and even wiser. What I think will change, is the way we use corporate e-mail. I agree that the current abuse of that must stop. I believe that in the near future, corporate e-mail accounts will be abandoned for non-corporate, private e-mail accounts. It has already started. People are preferring their GMail-accounts over their corporate, firewalled and overly abused e-mail accounts because they want to be free. And it will be okay, because future businesses are built on openness and trust. We will need codes of conduct and perhaps a set of global laws, but I am way out of my field there.
Technology Predictions 2009: the compilation
As we are entering the final stage of quite an interesting year, let’s see what the collective wisdom of the contributors to our CTO and Capping IT Off blogs has come up with. Here is our compiled list of 2009…
End of 2009 and wondering if this needs a revisit. Email seems just as strong as 12 months ago, and sites such as ShareThis are reporting that email still accounts for the majority of their usage.
It’s still the first thing i check in the morning so would hazard a guess it’s here to stay for a while yet.