David Tebbutt

Unless your organisation has bought into things like blogs, wikis and RSS feeds, I would guess that you are finding email as overwhelming as ever. For a start, there’s conventional spam. Are you trapping it okay? Are you sure it’s not trapping genuine emails too? If my experience is anything to go by, I’d say this is a growing problem. Do you scan the spam? Or trust the filters?

Then there’s corporate spam, the masses of emails that are cc’ed or bcc’ed to you. How many do you actually need to see? Have you become so anaesthetised to them that you don’t bother to read them any more? But what if one is really important and you missed it. “But I did copy you on that mail.” Oh dear.

How do you cope when you return from holiday and realise that you have weeks of backlog to wade through? I knew a professor of IT once who had a simple solution ­ he just didn’t read email. “If it’s important enough, they’ll call me.” Brave man. His only involvement with email was to tell the IT department to empty his inbox whenever they told him it was nearing capacity.

All the major organisations I work with would collapse without email. However, most of them can take practical steps to wean themselves off unnecessary email. They could abandon the ‘:cc’ mentality for a start. Why do people do it? Is it backside covering? Spreading the risk? A “reply all” is the instinctive response, thus perpetuating the problem. This is better than leaving someone important out of the loop.

Ross Mayfield, boss of wiki firm Socialtext, labels this ‘occupational spam’, as in ‘occupational hazard’. And, even though he has a clear vested interest, he’s right. One way to reduce it is to get dispersed workgroups to collaborate around wiki-like software. They can update shared wiki pages, attach or point to related materials and leave a clear audit trail, dramatically reducing the complexity and time costs of trying to collaborate by email.

Instant messaging, if allowed, is terrific for the quick Q&A, much faster to deal with than email and it can be non-intrusive because you don’t have to declare your presence if you’re really busy. If someone’s desperate, they can still pick up the phone.

A blog is more of a foghorn for the individual who has information to share, but it can lead into discussions through direct comments and trackback links to other blogs where the conversation has been taken up. It’s better than emails because the reader is in control of what they look at, and when.

Finally, RSS feeds are a very useful tip-off tool. They can report on changes to any web pages. Perfect in wikis ­ just subscribe to the pages that interest you. (In a team wiki, a feed from the ‘latest changes’ page is probably enough.) RSS feeds work in blogs and forums, both of which offer good ways to share important information without cluttering the inbox.

So there are ways to reduce the email burden. Yet some people, especially those in the social software world, will still insist that emails are dead or dying. In fact, email could well be heading for a renaissance as a person-to-person communication tool.

Exactly what it was invented for.

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