Further Reports From The Front Lines In The War Against E-Mail

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Back in April I mentioned a new-ish idea for breaking free from the chains of e-mail slavery that I'd just seen talked about at the Web 2.0 Expo. For people who deal with e-mail all day long this is a pretty interesting and exciting idea, for people who don't, well, it probably isn't. The general idea consisted of two steps: 1) Set up autoresponders on all of your e-mail accounts saying you are checking e-mail infrequently and 2) Actually check your e-mail infrequently. There's more to it than that of course but that initial spark set me and several other people on a holy grail like quest to put a working model of this into practice.

A little preface here, prior to April it was not uncommon for me to receive over 1000 e-mails a day, a solid 800 or so of which were expecting some kind of a reply. I'd start checking my e-mail first thing in the morning and I'd get new e-mails before I could respond to the unanswered ones. Hours would go by and my inbox would get bigger, not smaller. Upon further investigation I realized that the bulk of this was conversations I was having with people over e-mail. It would start off simple enough with a general question or some bit of info I needed, I'd reply, they'd respond to my reply, then I'd do the same and that would continue on for hours. For the record e-mail is hands down the most inefficient way to have a conversation with someone -- 50 back and forths later we'd finish up a discussion that could have happened in a matter of minutes via some other communication method.

Figuring that out was a big step for me, as simply not checking e-mail wasn't really an option due to the fact that so much of my work and daily activity requires interaction with other people -- the trick then became how to push those e-mail conversations into another platform. Right about this same time Tantek started working on a master set of communication protocols to try and determine what works and what doesn't. I used this as a springboard and created a public "preferred means of contact" that I started asking everyone to reference before contacting me. I looked at this much like a river overflow system -- I wanted to be sure the flood was directed through these channels before I built a dam in the river. Once all of that made sense I added the autoresponders and stopped responding to e-mail that didn't specifically require me to do so.

This might sound crazy, but it's actually working. At last count I was getting under 100 e-mails day now, but that's decreasing and I'd venture to say I'm closer to 50 at this point. But the key here is that I'm not any less productive and I'm not missing any conversations -- I'm just having them in a few minutes via IM or phone rather than multi-hour e-mail threads. This of course is the main goal, freeing up more time which I've definitely done. An interesting side effect I'm seeing is that this is spreading. I've heard from more than a few people that after seeing how this was working with me they attempted their own version of this with fantastic results. I'm very close to getting a friend to introduce a "no interoffice e-mail discussions" policy requiring his employees to instead use IM for the bulk of questions and answers that takes place at his company on a daly basis.

This isn't to say e-mail doesn't have it's place. It's great for reference or as a dump for sending large files, but as far as actually connecting with someone it's about as bad as it gets. (And don't get my started on services that e-mail you to tell you that you have new mail... actually maybe I'll talk about that next week) I'm definitely encouraging everyone to take a look at their own set up and see what forms of communication work and which don't, as well as soliciting feedback on my constantly evolving system. I'm fully convinced that e-mail is the problem, it's just the default people are resting on, as soon as a better option comes along there won't be much resistance to using it.

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