It’s rare that you come across an individual who feels like they simply don’t get enough email.
In fact, the reaction most people give you when you even discuss the topic of email evokes words and emotions like, “overwhelmed” and “out of control” to “I wish it would stop” and “please give me my life back.” Volumes of productivity and business books have been written about strategies and techniques to overcome and conquer your inbox. On a personal note, I’ve come to accept that my inbox is just one big, never-ending game of Tetris – where the email keeps flowing down into my inbox. In this strange race against time, I’m competing to respond and move the correspondences over into their appropriate file folders. Unfortunately (and much like Tetris), the emails keep stacking up and increasing speeds to the top and it’s, essentially, “game over” for me. It doesn’t end and they are no bonus rounds or extra lives to save me.
The use and function of email has changed dramatically in the past few years.
If you look back to some of the more primitive forms of email, you may be surprised to learn that an email being sent in the early 1970s over the ARPANET (an earlier version of the Internet as we know it to be today) looks strikingly similar to an email that you’re reading on your BlackBerry right now. So, while the text and format of the message hasn’t changed much, how we use email as a communications tool has completely morphed. With all of the changes in communications coupled with our feelings of hopelessness and constant connectivity (it wasn’t that long ago that we all had to go to a physical computer to check our email, and it wasn’t immediately accessible in the palm of our hands), there must another way… and there is.
Here are the new rules of email:
Set up guidelines for email engagement and ensure that everyone is on side with them.
Because I travel and work strange hours, my team knows that they’re not required to respond just because I can’t sleep at 4 a.m. or because I’m sending email from a time zone in Europe. There’s an emerging trend of email bankruptcy. Individuals making a conscious decision to simply select all of their email in their inbox and delete it. To start over. To hope (and pray) that anyone who was in their inbox will both reach out to them again and understand that they simply can’t get out of the tsunami of digital messages that continually pound their way in.
There is no way to beat email, but the only thing worse than more email is no email.
With platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, most of us are now managing multiple accounts. Email (and all forms of digital messaging) is one of the key connecting points for many people in business. How you manage your email and how you setup those expectations will be critical to your success… and to your sanity.
What are your new rules for email? How has your email usage evolved or devolved?
The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business – Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:
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