Yours for Good Fermentables ™: Break the email chain?
I tell my customers and clients that email is the preferred manner with which to contact me. If I am talking in person to a person, I will not answer the phone. (I will return the call later.) I once stepped out of a office and called the person to whom I was talking when he interrupted our conversation to take a phone call.
With email, however (although this may seem to be a tautology) I answer email at the time of day when I have the time to do so (usually early in the morning).
There is a problem with email as a business tool. When one’s InBox is crammed full, email can become a nearly all-consuming time demander. Here’s more on that, from an IBM ITer:
I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.
It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.
I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.
I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip
By LUIS SUAREZ
Published: June 29, 2008
New York Times
I recently had a discussion with a brewer at a small brewery now partly owned by Anheuser-Busch.
Many of his days are devoted to responding to a barrage of emails from layers of A-B managers, many asking the same questions or for the same reports, and many of whom he doesn’t even know.
The above NY Times article might be of assistance to Anheuser-Busch, especially in light of their recent anouncement of $1 billion of cost-cutting.