1 November 2007

Declaring e-mail bankruptcy

By Jim Pinto

There has been an explosion of e-mail in offices everywhere, and not all of it is spam. In 2006, 6 trillion business e-mails crossed the virtual transom. In the past two years, e-mail traffic has nearly doubled.

Answering 50 or 100 e-mails a day—or just wading through them—can disrupt workflow and cost money. If you do not respond to your e-mail, your Inbox grows; if you do, you may spend all of your time responding. So now e-mail is giving many people the feeling that it is too much; their work is never done; they get the feeling of being overloaded.

Like so many other technology innovations, the convenience of e-mail has become too much of a burden for many people. Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages and plagued by a huge amount of annoying spam and viruses, some users are declaring “e-mail bankruptcy.” They are turning off e-mail entirely and are moving back to the telephone as their preferred means of communication.

Perhaps more common, many are simply abandoning an old e-mail address and starting fresh. Of course, this means sending e-mails to those you want to e-hear from. Then the cycle starts again.

After spending 80 hours trying to clear out his backlogged inbox, Stanford Law School professor and Wired columnist Larry Lessig decided to surrender. “Bankruptcy is now my only option,” he wrote in a mass message to his correspondence “creditors.”

Here is how Lessig erased his debts and started again:

1. Collect the e-mail addresses of everyone to which you have not replied. Paste them into the BCC field of a new message, which you send to yourself.
2. Write a polite note explaining your predicament. Apologize profusely and promise to keep up with your e-mail in the future.
3. Ask for a resend of anything particularly pressing, and offer to give such messages special attention.

Some people do not want to go through the drastic-seeming measure of declaring total e-mail bankruptcy. Instead, they are trying to discourage the use of e-mail in favor of more personal calls or instant messages.

If you do not want to try the extreme step of declaring e-mail bankruptcy, here are a couple of tips: Because it is easy, do not use e-mail all the time, use it more effectively. Do not rely on e-mail to be an urgent forum for discussion. Instead, it should be a peripheral tool for keeping in touch with colleagues and clients. Keep your e-mail messages short and do not let circles of conversation take place in round after round of e-mail.

Related links:

• Declaring email bankruptcy:
  http://valleywag.com/tech/trends/declaring-e+mail-bankruptcy-254608.php
• Wired: How To: Be More Productive:
  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/howtodesk.html
• Overcoming E-Mail Overload at Work:
  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4490997

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and founder of Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com. Read the Table of Contents of his book, Pinto’s Points, at www.jimpinto.com/writings/points.html.